Month: September 2010

Greg Schloesser has just announced the winners of this year’s IGA. In the multi-player category, the award went to a game I’ve actually not played: Age of Industry – the streamlined version of Brass designed by Martin Wallace and published by Treefrog. The award for the best two-player game went to Campaign Manager 2008, designed by Christian Leonhard and Jason Matthews and published by Z-Man Games. Congratulations to all the winners especially as they were up against some very stiff competition.

There’s a new more portable version of Mr Jack now available. I picked up a copy from Leisure Games. However, although it retains the main elements of the original, it does play differently. For one, the board is made up of a 3×3 grid of square tiles, showing alleyways, walls and each of the suspects. Holmes, Watson and dog Toby move around the edge of the grid (as in Kupferkessel & Co.) and depending on what they can see down the alleys they stand next to, they eliminate suspects from their investigations. Without having played it yet, it looks very clever and I can’t wait to try it. The box says it only takes about 15 minutes so it ought to be easy to get to the table.

I’ve got a very large batch of games (55 to be exact) up on Ebay, the auctions for which are due to end on Wednesday. Too many to mention each of them here but these include the fabulously produced Wicketz, Cannes by Splotter Spiele, the large tennis dexterity game Tennis Masters, Ponte Vecchio, Meteo (also known as Wind und Wetter), Big Deal, Wolfgang Kramer’s City and loads of cheap card games. Get bidding before they go forever! The link is here.

The winner of this year’s DSP has just been announced as Fresko, designed by Marco Ruskowski and Marcel Süßelbeck and released by Queen Games. The list of the top ten with the voting points shown after the publisher was:

1. FRESKO by Marco Ruskowski and Marcel Süßelbeck (Queen Games) 2.087
2. VASCO DA GAMA by Paolo Mori (What’s Your Game?) 2.033
3. WORLD WITHOUT END by Michael Rieneck and Stefan Stadler (Kosmos) 1.701
4. TOBAGO by Bruce Allen (Zoch Verlag) 1.389
5. HANSA TEUTONICA by Andreas Steding (Argentum Verlag) 1.292
6. ENDEAVOR by Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray (Lookout Games) 1.144
7. EGIZIA by Acchittocca (Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Stefano Luperto and Antonio Tinto) (Hans im Glück) 994
8. MACAO by Stefan Feld (alea/Ravensburger) 965
9. DUNGEON LORDS by Vlaada Chvatil (Czech Games Edition/Heidelberger Spieleverlag) 759
10. POWER STRUGGLE by Maximilian Thiel (eggertspiele) 669

Today saw two deliveries from Germany of new games, which has pushed my unplayed list back up to 28 – it did get as low as 19. The ten additions to the collection were:

Asteroyds (Ystari), Bombay (Ystari), Ca$h ‘n Gun$ (Repos), Der Goldene Kompass (Kosmos), Hab & Gut (Winning Moves), Jager und Sammler (Amigo), Pingu Party (Amigo), Schweinebande (Hans-im-Gluck), Snapshot (Kosmos) and Wurfel Ligretto (Schmidt). Ca$h ‘n Gun$ is the one I’ve played before.

I’ve done a bit of house-keeping with the archive session reports to split them by year (the complete list since July 2001 was getting a bit long). Hopefully, everything still works ok but, if you spot any errors, please let me know.

And as a challenge, can you identify the pictures for each year on the main archive sessions page?

Picked up this very interesting solo / two player co-op game published by Z-Man Games. Tried a solo play of the basic game on Wednesday evening and really enjoyed it (even though I don’t tend to play solo games – hey, I was in a hotel in London so needed something to fill the time). Lost by one door – trying to get to eight before the deck ran out. The rules don’t help to sell the game but once you get into it, it’s a very clever puzzle with some anguish when the dream cards turn up when you don’t want them to. Really good and it will be interesting to see both how it plays as a 2-player co-op and with the expansions included in the box.

We tried out this Reiner Knizia game published by Playroom Entertainment last night. It turned out to be quite a bit more thinky than I had expected. On your turn, there are lots of places to play and you want to be sure that you’re not setting someone else up to freeze you out of claiming a tile. And the scoring has got that typical Knizia wonkiness that gives you even more to try and work out. We quite enjoyed it and Chris managed to pip me on the tie-break for the win by a single artefact symbol.

Shaun Derrick emailed me to let me know what is happening with the next expansion to his great football (soccer) game. This is what he said:

“Expansion set 6 is in the design process. It will include:

• 2 boards for the 2010 World Cup
• 20 New cards that can be added to the current deck. Each card represents one year in which the World Cup took place from 1930 up to 2014. However, it is entirely the players choice which cards to add to the deck and which to leave out. Some cards such as the 2014 ‘Goal-line technology’ can be used in all World Cup Games even though the subject matter may not be appropriate for that year.

Expected release date is 30 September.”