Coming soon: Sumeria

 

  

The next release from Jackson Pope’s  Reiver Games will be Sumeria, designed by Dirk Liekens. Here’s some info about the game, including a pre-order discount offer that will end on May 29th.

Players try to bring the city-states of ancient Sumeria to the fore. Each turn, players boost the importance of one of the city-states by flooding it with their traders, boosting its power. Each time a city-state gains power one or more will lose power. The aim is to gain control of the pre-eminent city-states during the scoring rounds at the end of each dynasty. Players have to time their movements, as a city-state can quickly lose favour too.

Sumeria is an area control game for 3-4 players aged 10 and up. Games last 30-60 minutes.

Sumeria will be launched at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham in June 2009. Pre-order your copy at the special pre-order price of £15 GBP – a saving of 40% on the retail price of £25 GBP. Shipping prices will be: First class to the UK – £3.11, airmail to Europe – £4.77 and airmail to the rest of the world – £8.12.

Sumeria features the following components:

  • A playing board featuring eight city-states
  • 2 large pawns – a start player marker and a turn marker
  • 8 city tiles
  • 56 trader tokens – fourteen each in four colours
  • 36 score tokens – nine each of four different types
  • a cloth bag

You can find more info about the game including the rules at the Reiver Games website.

Coming soon: Automobile

The next game in Martin Wallace’s Treefrog line is Automobile, a game about making money set in the U.S. car industry in the early twentieth century. Details of the game, including a download of the rules, are now available from the Warfrog site.

 This looks another solid game from Martin and I’m looking forward to seeing it at the UK Games Expo early in June.

Archaeology: The Card Game

Last night, Jan and I tried this new card game by Phil Harding and published by Z-Man Games. I was pretty impressed as it plays really well, has a good theme to tempt non-gamers and is all wrapped up in 30 minutes. The fact that it won best Australian game in 2008 does not surprise me (although it probably didn’t have too much in the way of competition).

Our game went right down to the wire with Jan winning by a single point: 106-105.

Beer & Pretzels 2009

Just a quick reminder of the next UK convention in the calendar:

The 20th Beer & Pretzels Games Weekend 2009
16th and 17th May
at
Town Hall, Burton on Trent, Staffs.
More Beer!
More Pretzels!
More Games!
Confidently expecting a good turnout, all three halls in the Town Hall have been hired, so there will be space for anyone planning something a bit bigger, or just more normal games. We have dug out the giant Labyrinth game and No Dice Games have confirmed that they will be running a selection of their RPGs, the usual VTES and Star Wars Tournaments will be running as well. More details as we get them.
The venue is still:
Town Hall
Burton on Trent
DE14 2EB
Times are still:
10.00am – 10.00pm Saturday
10.00am – 7.00pm Sunday
Tickets are still:
£4.00 per day
£7.00 for both days
Ample free parking, close to the railway station, local B&B’s and restaurants
 

Spielbox 2/2009 and Dominion (German) card offer

The latest edition of Spielbox turned up today. This included a set of Black Market cards for Dominion (with German text for obvious reasons). As I already have the English version, I’m happy to send these to the first UK person to contact me via the comments section below. (Don’t worry if your comment doesn’t appear straight away. My spam filter asks for my approval before publishing anything – can’t be too careful as I’m up to 500,00 spam comments received on this blog offering viagara and other unsavoury services).

This edition also featured reviews of Valdora, Wind River, Planet Steam, Senji, Steel Driver, Comuni and Fits. The last had mixed ratings but seems to have been widely played at Alan Moon’s Gathering of Friends and fairly well rated by some of the people I know from Essen (Valerie and others). I may have to investigate this further.

The issue also has fairly extensive coverage of the Nurnberg trade show and a feature on the latest electronic gaming gimmick trying to integrate a console with traditional board games.It’s called YVIO, produced by PublicSolution, for anyone interested in exploring further – I’m not!

Saturday gaming fun

I went along to the Telford mini-con on Saturday and spent around 9 fun hours gaming and chatting. Many thanks to Paul and David for organising this.

I managed to catch up with Paul Oakes, whom I’ve not seen for about five years or so, and I think he managed to twist my arm into going along to Midcon this November. It’s been a while since I last attended that convention and it is about time I put in another appearance.

Anyway, when I arrived, everyone other than David was busy playing other things so I took the opportunity to introduce him to two short two-player games by Reiner Knizia. Los Banditos is in the excellent Schmidt Spiele easy play line and is essentially Schotten Totten played with dice. Embarrassingly, my dice-rolling was appalling and David ran out winning that game 10-0. Ouch! I then showed him Robot Master, which is a tiny card game utilising a Euphrat & Tigris scoring mechanism. We played two games of this with each of us winning one game.

By this time we were able to mix up the groups but I showed off my Tumblin-Dice skills to a few of the guys while we were waiting. Next up was Islas Canarias by Leo Colovini, a game of using cards to develop an island based on the island’s features. Gaining a majority in each colour of building gave a special ability and this was what let the game down a bit as the ability to protect from the pirate and re-direct the attack to an opponent seemed extremely strong. Added to that, once a player had acquired the ability, it proved impossible for anyone else to take it away. I may need to check we were playing it right but, as I was the one with that ability, I couldn’t complain as it enabled me to claim the win although Chloe was pretty close in second place.

After that Steve and I played a relatively quick game of Oregon, which Steve won rather easily – unsurprising as he has played it so much online.

For my final game of the day, I sat down with four Power Grid fans and Chloe to play the China map of the game. I’ve played Power Grid maybe three times before and, although I think it is a very good design, I can’t be bothered to do the maths to optimise my turns / bids, preferring to go with my instincts. Having bought the highest numbered power station on my first turn, I found myself last in picking cities and was forced to go into an area competing with Steve. When the second phase began, he did his best to block me in but I managed to find a route out that wasn’t too expensive and enable me to expand further. By this stage, Chloe was rolling in cash and everyone felt she was in an excellent position to win. However, it turned out that she had left herself just a little too much to do to catch up in network expansion. As it turned out, Steve and I both managed to link to and power 14 cities at the same time and it came down to remaining cash to break the tie. Satisfyingly, I had a single Electro more for a surprise win.

And that was it for me. I left a bit before the end but had enjoyed the day very much. If they repeat the event, I’ll definitely be keen to go again. 

Tumblin’ Dice

I seem to be playing Tumblin’ Dice a fair bit at the moment, as it seems to go down really well with everyone who’s tried it. Over the weekend, we played four games at a family barbecue and, last night, we introduced it to Catherine’s boyfriend, Steve. In fact, the game last night featured a fantastic last round performance by Catherine when she scored over 60 points to overtake Jan’s 20 point lead going into the last round. The less said about my score the better.

UK Games Expo – 5th to 7th June 2009

 

 

 

Richard Denning has just sent me the latest info on this year’s event:

Book your Tickets for Expo 2009

We are happy to announce our booking system is now up with details of all our tournaments and RPG sessions so BOOK NOW!. Go to www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk

This year we have 80+ demo/participation games of all types. There are dozens of RPG sessions across all 3 days being arranged as well as 300 seats in miniatures, board game and card tournaments and of course the most diverse range of games exhibitors in a UK convention. Board games, role-playing, cards and miniatures: you can see them all.

If you fancy more time playing games at Expo this year then make sure you get the extended weekend ticket to enjoy all three days. The ticket grants you admission from noon on Friday 5th June to the RPG sessions and open gaming areas at the Strathallan Hotel.

Chaotic Launch Tournament

Win Awesome Prizes in the Chaotic UK National Launch Championship!

The Chaotic National Launch Championship will be held on 7 June at UK Games Expo. This is the first-ever major UK tournament for Chaotic, and the winner will have bragging rights as the first national champion ever!

But wait, it gets better! The winner gets a free trip to Gen Con Indy in the US (13-16 August; prize includes airfare, hotel, and 4-day Gen Con pass), including entry into all Chaotic events at Gen Con! The runner up takes home a Nintendo Wii. Four top finishers each score two displays of Chaotic boosters, and some of them will qualify for the Chaotic world championship later this year.

Win a Nintendo Wii in the Huntik Regional Championship at Expo

Fancy walking a way with a Nintendo Wii or an iPod and other prizes. Get yourself to the UDE stand Saturday morning 6th June at UK Games Expo and register for the Huntik Championship to be held that same day.

Entrants MUST bring their own Huntik Cards to enter and must have played and understood the the game in advance.

Bigger and Better for Wargamers

This year we are excited to welcome more wargames traders than ever including some of those developing exciting new ranges of metal and plastic figures.

New Board Games releases and prototypes

Be the first to grab a copy of Sumeria from Reiver Games or Automobile from Treefrog as well as other new games. Try out exciting new games in development.

Roleplaying at UK Games Expo

There are RPG events on 3 days this year which will run from noon on Friday 5th June.

These sessions will include Pathfinder and Living Forgotten Realms, Call of Cthuluhu, New 4e Eberron run by Keith Baker, games from Triple Ace Games, Cubicle 7 and Men in Black, Team 8 and many others.

There will be a special Dungeon Delve as well.

The extended weekend ticket gives you access to all of this.

Read about our Exhibitors

The web site now lists the 80+ exhibitors planning to attend Expo this year with the list growing all the time as bookings come in.

Calling All GMs!

We need GM’s to help run three days of Role-playing. Fancy running some RPG for us and your fellow gamers this year? Email: Tony Hyams at volunteer@ukgamesexpo.co.uk

Dominion cards shipping

I got an email yesterday from the folks at Boardgamegeek to inform me that the Envoy and Black Market expansion cards for Dominion had now been shipped to me. Hopefully, the trek across the Atlantic won’t take too long and we can look forward to trying them out soon.

Update: And I get home today and they’re here already. Jan’s comment was that Black Market sounds confusing.