French board game publisher Fentasy Games has launched a new platform aimed at providing publishers with a more affordable way to get their higher complexity titles into the hands of retailers and gamers.
Company founder and CEO Florian Gigot told BoardGameWire Fentasy had scored several successes since launching towards the end of 2024, including localisations of complex titles El Burro and Stephens – but said its major challenge in that time had been “the structural reality of the traditional distribution model”.
He said, “We realised that for a small publisher, a ‘critical success’ doesn’t always translate to a ‘financial success’ once the middlemen take their cut. The same applies to many of my partners around the world.
“…between squeezed margins, production costs, and trade discounts, even a popular game can become a financial failure. For an independent publisher, this means increasing difficulty in funding subsequent projects – and ultimately, a real risk of going out of business.
“In this context, profitability is no longer a secondary objective, but a condition for survival.”
Gigot hopes newly launched platform BoardGameCommerce will give publishers of higher complexity games with smaller print runs – of between 500 and 1,000 units – a more sustainable financial option than the traditional board game industry distribution model.
Gigot said BGC differs, however, in that Fentasy commits to producing the game the moment it goes onto the platform, saying, “We don’t ask the community to carry the industrial risk – we carry it ourselves because we believe in the project.”
He said that model helps Fentasy and other publishers measure real demand for their titles, as well as giving visibility to game makers that might not be possible amid the plethora of new games battling it out through traditional distribution.
Gigot added that BGC also offers retailers “a professional interface to secure limited stock with high margins of up to 55%”, with no payment required until the game is ready to ship.
He told BoardGameWire, “I absolutely see this growing. In fact, BGC is designed to be an agnostic platform. We are already in talks with other small publishers who face the same ‘strangulation’ within traditional distribution.
“We want to offer them the same resilience we built for ourselves – bringing everyone together on a single, global platform. It makes it much easier for gamers and retailers to find exactly what they are looking for in one place.
“The icing on the cake is that all publishers using the BGC platform have access to a shared licensing ecosystem. For example, if Publisher A adds a game to BGC and is looking for a partner to localise it, Publisher B can check the available licenses for their country and initiate a business discussion immediately.
“BGC takes 0% commission on these deals – the goal is simply to be stronger together.”
Gigot said Fentasy aims to release between three and five titles each year, with about half going through BGC and half, such as its localisation of Animal Rescue Team and upcoming strategy title Microlonies, through traditional distribution.
The BoardGameCommerce platform
The publisher’s first release through BGC is Iron Games’ Mesopotamia-themed territory builder Papyria, with future titles set to arrive on the platform before the end of next year including Martin Wallace space exploration design Casus Belli and Masaki Suga’s chocolate industry strategy title Bean to Bar.
Other Iron Games releases available through BGC include Discordia and its Magna expansion, Pandoria and Ploc, while Fentasy’s French localisation of Uwe Rosenberg design Kanal – previously Oranienburger Kanal – is also present on the platform.
But Gigot added, “Titles like Animal Rescue Team and Microlonies will still follow the traditional distribution model. We aren’t abandoning big distribution – we are simply choosing the right tool for the right game.
“There is no ‘hostility’ toward the traditional model – it just isn’t built to sustain niche titles effectively.”
Gigot said Fentasy’s biggest successes since its late 2024 launch have included Kikai – Bricolage Heads, which he said moved more than 4,000 copies “in a short window for a game of its complexity”.
He added that 2026 release Microlonies “is following the same successful path. It proved that a hungry audience exists for deep, high-production-value games”.
Fentasy’s success to date has persuaded Gigot – who runs the company as “a small, agile core team of one person” – to expand its scope internationally, with him telling BoardGameWire the business is moving towards a 60% international / 40% France split.
He said, “We are always looking for new partners to localize our games in their countries and to localise their games into French.
“Our goal for 2027 is to achieve a synchronized BGC launch for our expert line across Europe (Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain) and Canada, China, allowing local publishers / retailers to bypass the heavy costs of international imports.”
It’s Women’s Day! A great opportunity to look pair a book and a game on the American women’s suffrage struggle: The Woman’s Hour (Elaine Weiss) and Votes for Women (Tory Brown, Fort Circle).
The Woman’s Hour was published in 2018 by Viking Press. It focuses on the campaigns for and against Tennessee to ratify the 19th Amendment which enshrined women’s suffrage in the US constitution – as the 36th, and decisive, state to do so.
Votes for Women was published in 2022. It is Tory Brown’s first published board game. The card-driven game can be played in a solo or cooperative mode with the player(s) representing the American suffrage movement from 1848 to 1920 against an automated opposition, or with two to four players facing off against each other (half of them for, the other against women’s suffrage). In either case, the suffrage players must win 36 states (either by shoring them up decisively during the game, or in the final vote on ratification of the federal amendment) to win.
Connections & Conclusions
At first look, book and game seem to have very different scopes. After all, Votes for Women sets in with the Seneca Falls Convention (at which women’s suffrage was first voiced as a political demand in the United States) in 1848 and covers the following 72 years, whereas The Woman’s Hour begins with the arrival of activists Carrie Chapman Catt, Sue White, and Josephine Pearson at the Nashville station in the sweltering summer of 1920. Yet as the narrative progresses, background stories are woven into the tapestry – on the context of the 1920 presidential election, suffragists’ previous efforts to gain voting rights for women in the states and to lobby for a federal amendment, the women’s suffrage movement’s relationship with abolitionism, and all the way back to Seneca Falls (and a little bit of Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies”). If you have played Votes for Women, you will recognize many of the people and events on the cards from the early and middle periods of the game when reading The Woman’s Hour.
The Seneca Falls Convention is the Start card for the suffragist player with which any game of Votes for Women kicks off, following the tradition laid out by protagonist Elizabeth Cady Stanton that this was the starting point of the American women’s suffrage movement.
What unites book and game is their focus on procedural politics. Historical change does not simply happen, nor is momentarily decided upon. Instead, it is brought into effect by the “strong, slow drilling into hardwood boards with passion as well as sound judgment” (Max Weber). The drills used come in both cases from the toolbox of political activism:
The Woman’s Hour details how suffragists (suffs) and anti-suffragists (antis) lobbied the Tennessee lawmakers, how they organized in associations and clubs to channel their activists’ time, funds, and energy, and, of course, how they campaigned for public opinion to win the hearts and minds of the American people with newspaper articles, public speeches, great processions, and all kinds of civil disobedience.
Votes for Women makes these the three actions from which the players choose on a given turn: Lobbying (for and against the 19th Amendment in Congress), organizing (to gain the crucial buttons which are the currency for some powerful in-game effects and die re-rolls), and campaigning (which spreads influence cubes and thus eventually decides if enough states come out in favor of ratification of the 19th Amendment or not).
Early in the game: There are still a lot of orange Opposition cubes, but the women’s suffrage movement has made some inroads (yellow and purple cubes). The large round buttons represent the movement’s organizational strength, the white columns (one already placed on the track under the picture of the Capitol) the willingness of Congress to pass the women’s suffrage amendment.
As we’ve mentioned civil disobedience already: The women’s suffrage movement was no monolithic bloc. One of the great dividing lines was that of styles: The more conventional part of the movement, organized in the late 19th and early 20th century in the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) led by Carrie Chapman Catt, paid close attention to appear as respectable as possible (knowing full well that their demand for equal suffrage was enough of a provocation to the male public opinion of the time). Others adopted a more radical style, inspired by the British suffragettes: The Women’s Party, led by Alice Paul (and represented in Tennessee by Sue White) referred to the president as “Kaiser Wilson” in reference to the German war enemy, burned him in effigy, and (successfully) provoked the police into arresting activists over minor infractions. The dainty young women and respectable matrons who served some prison time then embodied the injustice of depriving women of their vote.
The Woman’s Hour details these fractions within the movement, as NAWSA and the Women’s Party led entirely separate campaigns for Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment. While infighting was avoided, the reader is left to wonder if the movement could have been more effective if not for these parallel structures – or if the split between a more moderate and a more radical wing was able to compel a broader spectrum of audiences by working in parallel.
Votes for Women depicts the multifaceted character of the women’s suffrage movement by splitting the suffragist player into campaigner figures and influence of cubes of two colors (yellow/gold, the traditional color of the American women’s suffrage movement, and purple, a color which Alice Paul had coopted from the British suffrage movement). As several Opposition event cards target the highest concentration of one or the other color, the Suffragist player is well-advised to aim for an even spread of colors in the individual states.
The pluralism of the women’s suffrage movement is exemplified by the two colors… and a plethora of Opposition events which target only one or the other.
Votes for Women also tackles another split in the women’s suffrage movement which is outside the scope of The Woman’s Hour – that on strategy. After the initial push for women’s suffrage as a part of a great campaign for equal suffrage regardless of sex and race had failed in the aftermath of the Civil War, the suffragists disagreed on how to proceed: Some pushed for a federal amendment to the Constitution (like the 15th Amendment had codified the voting rights of black men), others wanted to win voting rights in the individual states first. While the struggle for women’s voting rights was eventually won with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in Tennessee, the voting rights advances in the individual states had laid the groundwork: Wyoming had established women’s suffrage as early as 1869, Montana sent Jeannette Rankin as the first woman to Capitol Hill, and by 1917, women in 19 states – mostly in the West and Midwest – had won the right to vote (sometimes only in a limited fashion, like voting in local elections).
Votes for Women’s stance is that it needs both – after all, the game is lost for the suffragist player if their lobbying fails to get the federal amendment through Congress, but to win, they need the strength amassed in dozens of local campaigns to have the amendment ratified in enough states. The game, however, makes a statement about timing: While it is possible for the suffragist to have Congress pass the 19th Amendment in the mid-game already, that is a decidedly risky strategy which gives the Opposition a lot of opportunity to snatch individual states and rack up the necessary 13 rejections which mean the failure of the amendment. The ideal move for the suffragist is to build up the strength in the states as much as possible before pushing Congress into action as late as possible. While that is not without its risks (Opposition can still try to throw wrenches in the wheels of congressional action), it spreads them more evenly between federal and local action.
As mentioned above, equal suffrage spread from the American West and Midwest. It had a much harder time in the Northeast and in southern states – like Tennessee. The southern states were not only more conservative in general, suffragists also faced specific obstacles there: Many southern whites remained committed to the cause of white supremacy after the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. Enfranchising women would give the right to vote to black as well as white women, and in the mind of the white supremacists, white women would be much less likely to actually exercise it (be it because they, as “proper” women, would rely on their men to represent them, or because they would not go to a polling station where they might meet with Black Americans). Others, while generally in favor of women’s suffrage, resented the method: After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had enshrined certain rights (including male voting) for Black Americans in the Constitution. Federal amendments were thus unpopular with many southern whites.
As The Woman’s Hour details, this provided for a lot of traction for the anti movement in Tennessee. Activists like Nina Pinckard and Josephine Pearson railed against carpet-bagging outsiders swooping down from the North to meddle with Tennessee’s affairs, warned of impending “negro domination”, and appealed to the chivalry of southern men to rescue their women from being thrown into the dirty cesspit of politics. That they themselves were knee-deep in that cesspit – after all, they were political activists! – bothered them as much as modern-day “tradwives” are bothered by the fact that their plea for women to be submissive to and dependent on their men is at odds with their often successful social media enterprises.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, many women opposed women’s suffrage on moral or political grounds. Votes for Women does a great job in showing the multi-facetedness of the anti movement beyond the male political and business establishment.
Inherent contradictions aside, the antis’ arguments needed to be countered by the suffs. Many of the white suffragists were willing to make rhetorical or substantial compromises: One of NAWSA’s most-cited statistics in the Tennessee campaign was that the number of white women in the south exceeded that of black men and women combined. Enfranchising women, so the more-or-less subtle subtext, would thus not threaten white supremacy – it might even strengthen it. In the end, the tacit agreement was like that found after the Reconstruction amendments designed to protect Black Americans’ rights in the South: The women’s suffrage amendment made its way into the constitution. Yet voting rights were overseen by the individual states, and federal institutions looked the other way about the blatant disenfranchisement of black voters in the South until the Voting Rights Act almost half a century later.
Neither The Woman’s Hour nor Votes for Women shies away from this uncomfortable part of the women’s suffrage movement: The protagonists of the movement are not portrayed as infallible saints in the book. While they held wildly progressive views for their time on women’s suffrage, their stances on issues of race and class were often more in keeping with those of their contemporaries. They also made tactical mistakes, like Carrie Chapman Catt railing against outsiders trying to influence Tennessee – a charge that was immediately turned against her, a Northerner herself, and restricted her visibility for the remainder of the campaign. And most of them were willing to make compromises for the cause of women’s suffrage – sometimes with themselves (Carrie Chapman Catt supported the US effort in World War I against her pacifist convictions lest the women’s suffrage movement be branded unpatriotic), and sometimes at the expense of others. In short, they were human.
Would the 19th Amendment have passed in Tennessee if the suffragists had been less willing to assuage the fears of southern whites about “black domination”? – Probably not – maybe another state could have become the decisive 36th then, but all likely options had been exhausted before. Did the Black Americans in the South, men and women, suffer from the continued disenfranchisement after 1920? – Undoubtedly.
The South is notoriously tough for the suffragists. Placing a ton of cubes there (plus some additional perks) is a tempting proposition.
Suffragist players in Votes for Women face the same strategic and ethical question (of course, with infinitely lower stakes): One of the most powerful cards in the game is The Southern Strategy which places an immense amount of suffragist influence in the South (representing the union between suffragists and white supremacists). It does open the suffragist for some counter-plays from the opposition, though. Savvy suffragist players might hold the card from turn to turn to play it as late as possible, as an uncounterable stratagem in the final struggle for women’s suffrage. Victories won that way have an odd aftertaste, I assure you.
Since Votes for Women has been released, it’s been in the top 5 of games I have played most often. And while I rarely re-read books, especially non-fiction (because there are always intriguing new books to read), I have come back to The Woman’s Hour and have now both read the physical book and listened to the (excellent) audiobook production. Besides all their worthy exploration and analysis of history, that speaks to both the game and the book being excellently crafted, incredibly engaging pinnacles of their respective medium.
Now this may sound a bit basic. Of course you want advantages! Yet when you’re planning what to do with your investment tile, you might often be tempted by other things – shiny prestige spaces, or simply spaces with a lower cost which help you gain the majority in the region. Advantages, however, are often the better choice: A well-chosen advantage can gain you another space (or deny it to your opponent) not only once, but several times over the course of a game. If your opponent is smart, they will often try to counteract your gaining of an advantage by unflagging the space which gave you the advantage, or at least gaining a similar advantage, which means you are acting and they are reacting.
France and Britain are fighting hard for the two spaces adjacent to the Baltic Trade advantage. You can see on the French player mat in the background that France has gained the Algonquin Raids and Mediterranean Intrigue advantages.
Some of my favorite advantages: The Indian alliances with Mysore, Nizam, or the Marathas which allow you to drown your opponent in a sea of conflict markers, the Asiento advantage whose discount on fleets gains you a cheap military edge – and spaces – which can be flexibly moved around, and, best of all, Baltic Trade whose debt reduction amounts to two free wild points every turn. Get it or at least deny it to your opponent!
Board Position First, VPs Second
Advantages are long-term benefits. In the same spirit, I advise you to prioritize the long-term benefits of a sound board position over the short-term gains of winning this regional or that global demand scoring. If your board position is good – if you have the right alliances, military outposts, and advantages – you will put pressure on your opponent, win wars, gain spoils, and the VPs will come rolling in anyway.
Both players have done their homework and placed a flag on a fort (hexagonal spaces) in North America – Britain in Halifax, France in Louisbourg.
A key investment in that sense is a turn 1 fort in North America. That’s the only theater which is active in all four wars, so the fort will give you a military benefit four times (a strength point and the conquest line) in addition to controlling its surroundings (which makes unflagging harder and removing enemy conflict markers easier), and, of course, it’s a space which counts for regional scoring.
Use Initiative Wisely
If your opponent scores a few more VPs than you early on, that is not only bearable, but might even be to your advantage, as the player behind in VPs has the initiative and decides who goes first in a turn. That’s a weighty decision, as going first gives you a better choice of the investment tiles, but going last allows you to mess with your opponent’s plans and they have no chance to repair the damage before scoring.
If this were the first turn – would you choose to go first or second as the player with initiative?
My rule of thumb is: I go last, unless there’s an odd number of investment tiles with a major action in the dimension that will be crucial (early on, that’s often diplomatic), or an odd-and-low number of investment tiles that allow you to play an event.
Which strategies and tricks do you use to win at Imperial Struggle? Let me know in the comments!
Before the Treaty of Alliance and the French declaration of war on Britain, France had supported the American Patriots materially. Now that France was a full belligerent, fighting forces would follow – first, the French fleet.
Admiral d’Estaing’s event card in Liberty or Death (Harold Buchanan, GMT Games) emphasizes the difficulties and opportunities of coordinating far-reaching naval operations. From the Vassal module.
A naval force under Admiral Charles Henri Hector d’Estaing, carrying a few thousand French land forces, was dispatched to North America in summer 1778. They embarked on an ambitious combined-force scheme together with the Continental Army to take Newport from the British. American-French cooperation (as well as army-navy cooperation) proved difficult, and the operation had to be aborted. In one of the more dubious decisions of the war, the British abandoned Newport, one of the finest natural harbors in New England, voluntarily soon after.
As joint operations had not yielded success, the American and British forces would usually operate separately for the next two years. That meant that the Americans continued to bear the brunt of the struggle for North America. The French navy and army, however, were crucial in tying down British forces in the by now global struggle: British and French forces fought over the economically crucial “sugar islands” of the Caribbean. A French armada, strengthened by Spain which had recently entered the war, threatened to invade Britain itself in 1779. Even in far away India, British forces were challenged by the French and their local allies. Players of Imperial Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games) will recognize these as the four regions in which Britain and France fight for supremacy – with victory going to the player who can balance their interests in the four regions best, taking losses where they must while making bigger gains elsewhere.
The board of Imperial Struggle depicts a world full of opportunities for conquest, alliance, and trade in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and India. In this particular game, the British have been expelled from North America, but done well in India.
The American Patriots had none of this strategic depth. If they were defeated North America, their cause would be lost. And even with French support, it did not seem like they could do more than brace themselves against the military and financial superiority of Britain… if so much. The harsh winter of 1779-80 decimated the Continental Army. Difficulties in paying the troops resulted in the mutiny of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Line regiments. The situation seemed so dire that Benedict Arnold, one of the most distinguished American commanders, betrayed the American cause (but failed to deliver the fort of West Point to Britain), serving in the British army for the remainder of the war.
The Benedict Arnold event in Washington’s War (Mark Herman, GMT Games) does not only give a die roll modifier in a battle to Britain, but also removes the (American) leader Arnold from the board. Experienced American players know this, of course, and will not entrust Arnold with important missions… thus, his invasion of Canada is unlikely to happen in the game. An interesting meditation on how much historical hindsight influences gameplay.
The Southern Strategy
Part of the American woes was the new British focus. As New England was lost to Britain, and too full of rebels to be retaken, the British turned their attention to the southern colonies which the believed to be populated by many British loyalists.
First, they advanced from Florida (supported by sea) into Georgia and took Savannah on December 29, 1778. A combined American-French land-sea operation failed to retake the city in June 1779. After this second joint operations failure, the French fleet relocated to the Caribbean. British forces under Charles Cornwallis laid siege to Charleston, South Carolina, the following March.
Lincoln never stood a chance. From the Rally the Troops! implementation of Washington’s War.
Benjamin Lincoln, who had commanded the American troops in the unsuccessful counter-offensive at Savannah, was put under enormous political pressure not to let Charleston, one of the most important cities in the south, fall into British hands. Retreat was thus impossible. Yet the defense of the city against superior British forces was doomed. Lincoln surrendered in May 1780.
Cornwallis’s next victim. From the Rally the Troops! implementation of Washington’s War.
Cornwallis also beat the new American commander in the south, Horatio Gates, at Camden (and thus cut Gates, the hero of Saratoga, back to size again). As the British general was poised to invade North Carolina, Washington dispatched Nathanael Greene to take command in the south.
Greene’s approach aimed to elude a decisive engagement. Contrary to British assumptions, the south was not rife with British loyalists. The crown was only supported where Britain could enforce loyalty – on the coasts, and wherever Cornwallis’s army was at the moment. And Cornwallis could not be everywhere. Small American forces under guerilla leaders (like “The Gamecock” Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion, on whom the movie The Patriot is based) chipped away at British forces and support. While Cornwallis beat Greene at Guilford Court House and Eutaw Springs in early 1781, he could not reverse the south’s affiliation to the Patriot cause.
Yorktown
Cornwallis lost patience with the indecisive campaign against Greene’s Fabian strategy. In 1781, he boldly struck into Virginia. His supply was to come from sea via the port of Yorktown on Chesapeake Bay. If Virginia, the largest and most populous southern colony was taken and thus the south cut off from the north, Greene would have to surrender – or so Cornwallis thought. Cornwallis’s good strategy rating in Washington’s War makes it likely that the British player will let him pursue similarly active campaigns… and hopes not to get caught by superior force.
Cornwallis’s plan was risky. Virginia was much closer to the American and French main forces than the Carolinas. The French commander Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, urged George Washington to confront Cornwallis. And thus a third joint operation began: Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a French volunteer in the Continental army, marched American and French forces to Virginia.
Cornwallis responded in the typical British manner: He fortified Yorktown and confidently relied on British naval superiority to keep his options open. That confidence was shaken when the French instead of the British navy showed up in Chesapeake Bay. The British sent a fleet of their own, but the resulting naval battle of Chesapeake Bay failed to expel the French fleet (September 5, 1781).
Between a rock and a hard place: Cornwallis was trapped by the American-French army and the French navy. From the Rally the Troops! implementation of Washington’s War.
Washington and Rochambeau took command of the combined army and invested Yorktown. As Cornwallis had failed to tenaciously defend the outer defenses, assuming he would be evacuated by the Royal Navy, the sieging forces advanced quickly. Cut off from supplies and under bombardment from the allied artillery, Cornwallis surrendered on October 17, 1781. His entire force of almost 8,000 was captured (with another 156 dead). French and American total casualties (dead and wounded) were barely over 200.
Peace
The war in the colonies had been unpopular in Britain for some years. Parliament was unwilling to expend more money on it, and thus the British forces deployed had never again reached their peak strength from 1776. With one of the two main British forces in the colonies lost, so was the parliamentary base for the government. When the Whig opposition’s motion to end the war in North America carried a majority, Prime Minister Frederick North resigned in March 1782. “North’s Government Falls” is the end of a game of Washington’s War, and can happen anytime between 1779 and 1783 (provided the event is face-up in the respective year).
North’s successors had to make peace with four separate enemies – the United States, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. The American negotiators Benjamin Franklin and John Jay proved most skillful in this complicated multi-sided diplomacy. They secured diplomatic recognition for the United States as well as the western domain all the way to the Mississippi and important fishing rights in the Atlantic. The Peace of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783.
The king of France had little time to enjoy his triumph. The war expenses incurred in the American Revolutionary War contributed to the financial crisis which resulted in the French Revolution (whose protagonists were in turn inspired by the American ideas of liberalism and republicanism) just six years after the Peace of Paris.
Britain, on the other hand, bounced back from the setback in North America. The country’s naval, commercial, and financial strength was still intact. Britain would orchestrate the coalitions against revolutionary and Napoleonic France until the final victory at Waterloo in 1815, ushering in a century of British global dominance.
And the United States? They remained within their own hemisphere for the time being. Only occasionally drawn into conflict with their erstwhile French allies or old British enemies, the United States dealt with their westward expansion and economic development. Despite its unresolved conflict internal conflict about slavery, the American republic remained an inspiration to European liberals and democrats who strove to follow the example begun 250 years ago.
Allison, Robert J.: The American Revolution. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York City, NY 2015 is exactly what it says on the tin.
Higginbotham, Don: The War of American Independence. Military Policies, Attitudes, and Practice, 1763-1789, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 1977 covers not only the campaigns, but also the political, social, and economic dimensions behind them.
Heute gibt es wieder ein altes Spiel … und dazu eines dass einen total spielerischen Namen hat. Game of Pure Strategy oder GOPS … ja … was soll man dazu sagen. Es wurde entwickelt von einem Mathematiker in den 1930ern.
Was braucht man dazu?
Ein Pokerdeck. Eine Farbe wird aus dem Spiel entfernt. Jeder Spieler bekommt alle Karten einer Farbe auf die Hand und die letzte Farbe kommt als verdeckter Stapel in die Mitte.
Reihenfolge der Karten: Ass niedrigste Karte, König höchste. Punkte für Karten: Ass – 1, Zahlenkarten der Zahlenwert, Bube – 11, Dame – 12, König 13.
Es gilt die Karten in des verdeckten Stapels zu gewinnen und damit mehr Punkte zu machen als der Mitspieler.
Ablauf
Denkbar einfach. Die oberste Karte des verdeckten Stapels wird auf gedeckt. Das ist der Preis für die Runde. Jeder wählt eine Karte aus und legt sie verdeckt ab. Dann werden die Karten gleichzeitig aufgedeckt. Die Person die die höhere Karte gelegt hat, gewinnt den Preis und legt die Karte verdeckt bei sich ab. Haben beide Spieler denselben Wert gelegt, bleibt die Preiskarte liegen und die oberste Karte des Stapel wird dazu gelegt. Wer am Ende die meisten Punkte hat gewinnt.
Meine Meinung
Hier haben wir ein sehr einfaches Spiel, dass anders ist als viele Spiele. Es ist wirklich nur Einschätzung des Gegners und sich eine eigene Strategie zurecht legen. Ich muss ehrlicherweise sagen, dass ich das ein paar Mal ganz unterhaltsam fand aber ich persönlich komme eher aus der spielerischeren Ecke und damit das einen Reiz für mich hat, würde es mechanisch noch etwas mehr Unterbau brauchen. Ich denke da an Hol’s der Geier von Alex Randolph, das mit mehr Personen spielbar ist und wo 1/3 der Karten im Punktestapel Minuskarten sind, die man nicht haben will (das ließe sich mit der aussortierten Farbe sogar bewerkstelligen…zumindest für 2 Spieler) oder in einem der Spielbücher von Reiner Knizia gibt es ein Spiel, wo dieser Mechanismus genutzt wird um Teile von Regionen zu kontrollieren und dann Gebietsmehrheiten abgerechnet werden.
Erwähnenswert finde ich das Spiel, da es ja beinahe ohne Regeln auskommt, man nur ein Pokerdeck braucht und es sicher einige da draußen gibt, die eine Menge Spaß damit haben können.
Heute gibt es wieder ein altes Spiel … und dazu eines dass einen total spielerischen Namen hat. Game of Pure Strategy oder GOPS … ja … was soll man dazu sagen. Es wurde entwickelt von einem Mathematiker in den 1930ern.
Was braucht man dazu?
Ein Pokerdeck. Eine Farbe wird aus dem Spiel entfernt. Jeder Spieler bekommt alle Karten einer Farbe auf die Hand und die letzte Farbe kommt als verdeckter Stapel in die Mitte.
Reihenfolge der Karten: Ass niedrigste Karte, König höchste. Punkte für Karten: Ass – 1, Zahlenkarten der Zahlenwert, Bube – 11, Dame – 12, König 13.
Es gilt die Karten in des verdeckten Stapels zu gewinnen und damit mehr Punkte zu machen als der Mitspieler.
Ablauf
Denkbar einfach. Die oberste Karte des verdeckten Stapels wird auf gedeckt. Das ist der Preis für die Runde. Jeder wählt eine Karte aus und legt sie verdeckt ab. Dann werden die Karten gleichzeitig aufgedeckt. Die Person die die höhere Karte gelegt hat, gewinnt den Preis und legt die Karte verdeckt bei sich ab. Haben beide Spieler denselben Wert gelegt, bleibt die Preiskarte liegen und die oberste Karte des Stapel wird dazu gelegt. Wer am Ende die meisten Punkte hat gewinnt.
Meine Meinung
Hier haben wir ein sehr einfaches Spiel, dass anders ist als viele Spiele. Es ist wirklich nur Einschätzung des Gegners und sich eine eigene Strategie zurecht legen. Ich muss ehrlicherweise sagen, dass ich das ein paar Mal ganz unterhaltsam fand aber ich persönlich komme eher aus der spielerischeren Ecke und damit das einen Reiz für mich hat, würde es mechanisch noch etwas mehr Unterbau brauchen. Ich denke da an Hol’s der Geier von Alex Randolph, das mit mehr Personen spielbar ist und wo 1/3 der Karten im Punktestapel Minuskarten sind, die man nicht haben will (das ließe sich mit der aussortierten Farbe sogar bewerkstelligen…zumindest für 2 Spieler) oder in einem der Spielbücher von Reiner Knizia gibt es ein Spiel, wo dieser Mechanismus genutzt wird um Teile von Regionen zu kontrollieren und dann Gebietsmehrheiten abgerechnet werden.
Erwähnenswert finde ich das Spiel, da es ja beinahe ohne Regeln auskommt, man nur ein Pokerdeck braucht und es sicher einige da draußen gibt, die eine Menge Spaß damit haben können.
Anmelden
