4VP - The Gentleman's Four

Given this weirdness, a disproportionate number of folks seem to play them. This is not for lack of other things they could be doing. Especially these days given the sheer number of multimedia, multi-modal activities people can use to pass time in a favourable way. Still they play, and it isn't just Monopoly, Risk and Scrabble. These are not your grandmother’s board games (though I'm sure Carcassonne would delight your grandmother. Seriously, she’d love it. You should probably give that a go. Why don’t you do that tomorrow?). Along with getting drinking and watching stuff, tabletop games are now a major way by which people get together and pass time. This however brings us to a key issue with board games: they are inherently exclusionary. Where a party or a few drinks with friends has no inherent limit, board games have a hard and fast line beyond which new players cannot comfortably join in. This traditionally hovers around the 4/5 player mark, with an ever growing number of exceptions which can support 7+ players and still remain a suitably fluid. This makes board game evenings a fun, but often small scale, affair. Then, there is Essen Spiel. Held annually at "Messe Essen", a huge convention centre in Essen (an old industrial city in the north west of Germany), Spiel is among the largest dedicated board games and toy trade fairs. Indeed, over the past 3 years the organizers have reported 150,000 people (think Glastonbury) all swarming into an old steel town in the north of Germany to manipulate little wooden cubes. To throw dice.      To reveal cards.           To play games. Spiel 2013 was just wonderful. Unlike previous years which sprawled across 6 of Messe's smaller halls, Spiel'13 was held in the 3 biggest halls. You walk in, greeted by a giant man wearing a Munchkin costume, behind which there lies an ocean of games. Games for playing and games for buying - all kinds of games. Board games, card games and RPGs, puzzles and toys, euro-games and Ameritrash, war games of every form - short, long and medium; casual and enthusiast. Most you can just sit down and play. They call this process "demoing" the games. First come first serve, but you can usually find a game within 5 minutes or so if you're looking. You sit down, a friendly person (sometimes a volunteer, sometimes the creator of the game) explains the rules... or you read the rules... and you play the game. In years past we have opted to stop games short just so we could fit more in, and yes, some walk you through an hour long session just to give you a taster, but in general what actually happens is you have literally hundreds of games which you can just sit down and play until you're done. Learn rules. Play game. Move on.      Eat some food, buy some dice, buy a game.           Find game. Learn rules. Play game. Move on...                In the evenings you go back to the hotel,                     find some table space somewhere,                          play some of the games you bought that day.                                    Games, games, games, games…                                       …for 4 days.                                                   It is mega. We played many games at Spiel this year, but this review isn't exhaustive. I played in the order of 5 to 7 games per day, most to completion, for 4 days and still managed to sample under 50% of the games available. I saw many more and, of course, brought a few home. These are the ones that stick in mind.

Relic Runners (here) First game played this year. By traversing a graph of temples to find power ups and eventually relics which win the game - Graph colouring, topology and a bit of seeded random. Really fun but I worry about future play-throughs, the map stays stationary so it might get stale after you figure out the graph. Kingdom Builder (here) This won the Spiel des Jahres award last year and had a new expansion released this year. Place tokens on a configurable set of 4 hex maps (from 8, choose 4 for a game - more in the expansions). The maps define special abilities, the cards define jobs. Really short game (under an hour) but I can see some awesome tactics. We bought a copy + all expansions for under the price of the main game on Amazon. (Rich reviewed Kingdom Builder here) Chaos Chess (here) This is really just one of many 4/3 player chess extensions on show this year. It was... like... ok... it wasn't amazing. I don't think we need 4 player chess. 1655: Habemus Papam (here) The pope is dead! Vote in a new pope! You do this via cards which contain actions to fuck other players. It’s a historically accurate game - cardinals do the things they actually did, some arrive late to the vote, the kings hate some of them, some of them die during the vote. Nice one off, not sure it has that much replay value. Pretty fun though, and educational! Coal Baron (here) By placing workers to explore coal shafts, get money, get new contracts and operate your mine. Fulfil your contracts, be the person who delivers most on certain types of coal, uses certain types of transport and digs certain types of mines. It's resource placement, its worker management. This is my jam. No wait, this is my jam. This is just a good game I'm probably going to buy. Citrus (here) Buy citrus groves and plant them near villas with workers. Be the highest yield on a villa to get points. Think Carcassonne meets some sort of train game with a bit of resource management.

Steam Park (here) Now this game was just lovely. You control a theme park, you grow it, it gets dirty, you clean it up, you build new rides you attract visitors you get points. The art style is rather fetching in a Tim Burton sort of a way. The play has a frantic first round which involves all players rolling dice and placing them on their own pig. The first to do so goes first for the rest of the round; the last to do so gets a dirty park. If your park is too dirty you loose the game! DIRTY PARK!

Yunnan (here) The theme is Chinese tea farmers. The game? Worker placement and point gathering. Thematically year of the dragon with less death. I can see many interesting tactics that might arise in this one. Of special note is its point gathering mechanic wherein you get a number of potential points every round from tea harvesting which each player must decided to split between money and points in any proportion. Money means actions next turn, but points take you closer winning the game. Krosmaster: Arena (here) This was a very bad game with pretty pieces. Game grid, move your dudes around, decide whether you have line of sight (deepest...fucking...SIGH). Roll the dice, think about what you're doing with your life, win the game. You can also BUY extra little dudes to fight. Emma says there was the best little stripy pig on one of the trees. She made a fair point. There was. Cornish Smuggler (here) Kickstarter winners and English game developers debut at Essen a worker placement and resource management game. You grow a network of contacts on the mainland that can handle your wares while you use your ships to gather new resources. The network is built from many (30+?) unique characters with interesting abilities and the shops gather little Tetris-like blocks. Seemed pretty good. Rampage (here) You control monsters destroying a city, eating its citizens, crushing other monsters and stealing their teeth. It's a physical game, by which I mean its mechanics include flicking your monsters feet to move around places, picking up your monsters and using dropping them to smash buildings, putting your head on the monster and blowing down little meeple citizens. Not the deepest of games but the monsters all get special powers, and the physical interaction will make for different games every time - perhaps a good end of evening game. Ladies and Gentlemen (here) Supports up to 10 people, a fun party game. You partner up with someone to create a husband/wife duo. There is a party at the end of the week, the wife must look the most elegant (read: have the fanciest stuff). The husbands work in the stock market all day (real time token grabbing game and money management) while the wives engage in competitive shopping (card selection and partial information mechanics). The wives don't know how much money the husbands make while the husbands don't know what the wives are trying to buy. The actions of the two sides happen simultaneously which makes for a frantic and fun game Trains and Stations (here) Trains across America! First and only train game I played this year. Lots of funny dice with train symbols on them. You roll, you decide what to keep, you roll again but that costs money. You place dice as tracks and when they are complete the dice return to you. Reasonable train game. Reasonable dice mechanic. Reasonably entertaining.

Quantum (here). Emma: "EMMA LIKE QUANTUM. EMMA BUY QUANTUM". It’s a space combat game with tiles and a really nice use of dice. The dice are your ships. The dice primarily hold state in that they hold which type of ship is where. Ships have different abilities and you can "reconfigure" (re-roll) a ship as an action. The combat is basically dice value vs. dice value. We've had a few games of this, quite quick, reasonable mechanics, very replayable (many tiles, many configurations) ...really fun. ...and that was it! Many games I haven't talked about but these were the stand out ones. Now back to the real world! I'll definitely be hitting Essen again next year - I had forgotten how much fun it was bounding around a massive convention hall playing infinity games. I feel game-saturated. Gameurated. Essen Spiel, highly recommended, you should go.

There are only three things you can do on a turn, you can either draw more cards, complete a route (paying with the cards you’ve previously picked up), or you can get more tickets. The key point here is that none of the three options feels like a waste of time. You NEED cards, you NEED routes and you NEED tickets, so as it comes round to your turn (and turns are incredibly quick in this game, usually) everything feels productive. You can even forgo picking up your usual two cards in order to pick up a single rainbow card (which acts as a wild card). Even this is rarely a waste of time because in some crucial situations, getting a route completed quickly can be the difference between making a nice, neat, straight line and having to divert all the way to Atlanta in order to get to New York. And here’s something that I know some of you will despise. Infotainment. Or Edutainment. Or Funtimelearningmisdirection. Whatever you call it (and those of you sickened by those words will want to know that the first two were NOT flagged by my spell checker as made up words), this game does teach you about North America geography in a very non-invasive manner. Before playing this game I had no idea that Duluth was even a place, let alone be able to point to it on a map. In some game situations though, this really does speed things up. When you get a ticket that suggests you connect a route from Los Angeles to New York, you sit back in horror. You don’t need to look and analyse the board searching for those two very far apart locations, because you know that Los Angeles is warm and sunny and on the West coast and you know that New York is cold and islandy on the East coast. And for those of us who are geographical buffoons, the tickets even have a tiny map on them with the locations highlighted. It’s very subtle and not patronising to those who know the locations, but very helpful to those who don’t, which of course ties into the whole aesthetic aspect of the game.

The huge board is basically one huge map, with lots of sepia tones and pleasant pastel shades. This brings out the vibrant plastic train pieces very successfully, and emphasises this gradual expansion of your empire. Also, they are tiny train carriages (choo choo!). What once was a boring empty map is now a multi-coloured spaghetti vomit. Everyone’s trains are all tied together in a dance of locations and points. And whilst the game is incredibly pleasant, this dance must lead to conflict or it’s just Dominion. The conflict in this game mainly comes down to that fact that routes can only be claimed once per game. As mentioned before, if you are too slow getting the right cards for the job, you can quickly see yourself being diverted. This is quite a natural thing in the first few games; people get denied options because of coincidences in destinations- only natural, especially with more players. One problem occurs when more experienced players are thrown into the mix.  After a few run-throughs you get a sense of the range of the tickets on offer, and if playing a newbie you can often predict routes they are trying to take, especially if the full route is mapped out except for a few gaps. Then the game gets way more tactical and instead of being about building your empire, it becomes about sabotaging your opponents, slotting in that vital two train route on the go before they do, even though it may not even connect with your empire.

Another area of conflict I’ve found arising is when you choose to pick up cards on your turn. Your friend might quite clearly be going for the six-train yellow route, and since there are two yellow cards turned face up you naturally pick them. Not because you need them, just because, you know, you’re an ass. What’s peculiar is that this is exaggerated with fewer players. On the whole it’s a lot easier to notice the specific comings and goings of your opponents if there are only two or three of them, whereas with more players everything becomes lost in the mix. Also, there are big advantages to screwing over the opponent in a two player game, but if you’re sacrificing your own points to only hit one other person in a five player game, you are taking a much more serious hit, so it better be worth it. In a two player game it can get (dare I say it?) slightly heated, especially if you’re both very familiar with the game, but in a four or five player game it becomes much more insular, each player only focusing on expanding their own network and adapting to coincidental hazards thrown their way. It is in that groggy twilight that I recommend Ticket to Ride. The four or five player game is just so nice to sit back and play. You don’t have to worry about people messing with your trains, because it’s not in anyone’s benefit to do so. You all sit down, look at the nice cards, play with the nice trains and learn about North American geography. I have often found that the building of an efficient and pleasant looking network is perhaps more important than any attempt at winning the game, not just for me, but for others as well. The competitive nature of the game is almost an afterthought it is so warm.