The first issue of 2011 of Spielbox arrived on Saturday and included a copy of the 8th Wonder (Mannekin Pis) for the game 7 Wonders. So the 8th Wonder is no longer an “Essen exclusive” after all.
In the magazine, there is another big article on the Essen releases, this time concentrating on games from France, Great Britain, Poland, Sweden, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. The reviews include Forbidden Island, 7 Wonders, London, Troyes and Lords of Vegas. Plus, there’s a short interview with JKLM’s Markus Welbourne, a portrait of Lookout Games and articles about Heinz Meister and his new game, Avanti.
The latest Alea release arrived at Shire Games today so I took a diversion on the way home and picked up a copy. This is another Stefan Feld design that uses dice in an interesting way. Players are trying to develop their estates through trading, livestock farming, city building or scientific research. Players have two dice that they allocate to their choice of actions, the four choices being taking tiles from the gameboard into their storehouse, moving tiles from the storehouse to their estate, selling goods, or taking worker tiles to help manipulate the dice rolls in future. The game looks like an interesting game of forward planning and optimising choices based on the dice you roll.
Issue 52 of Counter has just been published and runs to 84 pages this time. As is usual for the first issue of the year, several of the contributors run down their top 5 games of 2010: Lots of love shown for Navegador, 7 Wonders, London and Age of Industry but I was also quite pleased to see Greg Schloesser have Telestrations as one of his picks – not the usual Counter fare but an excellent game all the same.