Spiel: Boardgaming in the UK

This Friday’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club (30th May 2008) will be at Garry’s house.

The nominations for the Spiel-des-Jahres have just been announced. The five nominees are:

• Blox, by Wolfgang Kramer, Jürgen P.K. Grunau, Hans Raggan(Ravensburger)
• Keltis, by Reiner Knizia (Kosmos)
• Suleika, by Dominique Erhard (Zoch)
• Stone Age, by Michael Tummelhofer (Hans im Glück)
• Wie verhext!, by Andreas Pelikan (alea)

The two I’ve played (Stone Age and Keltis) are both good choices and I expected them to appear on the list. The other three I don’t know too much about although the Kramer game looks too abstract to be a likely winner.

Agricola didn’t appear as a nominee but that is not a surprise as it looks a bit too complex for your typical family game. It did, however, pick up a special award.

The winner of the SdJ is announced on 30th June 2008.

… that Trickylight won best Game Club Site in the 2007 Board Game Internet Awards. Well, Eric Martin has just sent me a really snazzy badge to prove the fact. This means I need to get back on top of the game reports (as we’re a couple of weeks behind). I don’t want to be a contender for the 2008 worst game club site.

After speaking to John this evening, I can confirm that the next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be on Friday 16th May at John’s house. Anyone turning up at Garry’s house will be set upon by various children, animals etc. and forced to sit through several episodes of How I Met Your Mother (If you don’t know, don’t ask!)

Just a reminder that this weekend, the 19th Beer and Pretzels game weekend will be held at the Town Hall, Burton on Trent, Staffs. The fun starts at 10 a.m. on the Saturday and runs until 10 p.m. that day, with the Sunday hours being 10 a.m. until 7 p.m.

Further details can be found on the Spirit Games website here.

Last night, Jan and I tried out Shanghaien, a Michael Schacht and Roman Pelek design that was published by Abacus. What an excellent little game it is. Strictly two player, it is a game about recruiting sailors of various nationalities to join your crew.

Each of the eight rounds involves a struggle over six sailor cards (or special action cards) with each card corresponding to the numbers 1-6 0n a die. The player rolls two dice and picks one to allocate to the card matching that number. When a player chooses to, or is forced to, end the round, whoever allocated the most dice to a card wins that sailor/special action. Ties are broken by the value of dice allocated to neighbouring cards, which adds an extra tactical consideration to picking which die to use during the round. After eight rounds, sailors in each nationality are compared and the player with the stronger sailors in the nationality gains VPs equal to the value of the weaker player’s sailors. However, if you have a monopoly of sailors in a nationality, you score VPs matching your own strength.

There is plenty to weigh up each turn to make the game interesting but never too much to keep track of , which is ideal for the more casual gamer. The game plays to a finish in 20-30 minutes and seems great fun. This should get plenty of play around here.

It’s been a while since I ordered a batch of games from Germany. Following the demise of Adam Spielt, I’ve not found another online mail order to fill the gap. However, last week, I decided to take the plunge and put in an order with 12Spiel and the order arrived yesterday.

In terms of the service, it was pretty good: I got an email confirmation of my order as soon as I  placed it on Tuesday, stating that it would ship within 3-5 days; then an email to say the order had been sent on Friday; and the goods turned up yesterday, Tuesday so pretty quick although not quite as fast as Adam Spielt. The packing wasn’t as good as Adam Spielt (but then nobody could really match their box within a box and bubble filling). There was just some paper packing and not really enough to keep the contents steady in transit. That said, however, all the games arrived unharmed. So all in all, I’d use them again but may still try to see if there are any better alternatives. Recommendations from other people will be gratefully received.

Anyway, what did I get? Eight games in all, which will be added to my Trickylight database in the next couple of days: Metropolys (Ystari), Toledo (Kosmos), Keltis (Kosmos), Gangster (Amigo), Neuland (Eggert Spiele), Double or Nothing (Piatnik), Big Points (Schmidt) and Shanghaien (Abacus).

The next meeting of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be on Friday 2nd May at Garry’s house.

Perikles, published by Warfrog, is a Martin Wallace game I somehow missed out on acquiring when it came out in 2006. I rectified this when the local TK Maxx was selling copies off cheap and we finally got to play it this week. Set in the Peloponnesian War, each player represents a powerful Greek family with political influence spread across the six major city states of ancient Greece. Players strive to become leaders of these cities, thus taking control of their military forces. With these forces players will aim to win glory on the battlefield.

The game is played over three rounds. Players start by taking influence tiles that allow cubes to be placed in a particular city. Once each player has taken four tiles, an election to become leader takes place in each city. Players take turns proposing a candidate in a particular city and each city can have two candidates. Once all the candidates have been determined, whichever of the two candidates has more influence cubes in the city is elected leader and is given control of its military forces. Seven battles are then fought. Players take turns committing military forces to particular battles and, if a player does not control any city, they get to represent the Spartan forces. The relative strengths of the opposing forces is determined and two rounds of battle are fought using dice, with the stronger force having a greater probability of rolling successfully. The winner of the battle is rewarded with the location tile which gives a number of VPs at the end of the game. Once all the battles have been resolved, the city leaders have statues erected to them (for more end of game VPs). Then if either Athens or Sparta have lost four battles, the game ends immediately or you proceed to the next round. After three rounds, the game ends anyway and players total their VPs from statues, battle location tiles and influence cubes remaining in the cities and most VPs wins.

In our game, the first round saw four Sparta battles turned up giving the possibility that the game might end after the first round. Sparta survived just barely, losing three out of the four, and everyone other than me breathed a sigh of relief. I had managed to gain control of two cities and rode the odds well in winning three battles so, had the game ended at that point, I would have been well ahead. However, this then made me a target in rounds two and three. I also had lost lots of influence cubes in Corinth due to a heated election campaign between me and Nige. Nige concentrated on winning elections and protecting the cities whose statues were worth most points and he looked pretty strong by the end of the game. Mark K was intent on remaining leader of Thebes for all three rounds and towards the end chose a few useful battles to commit forces to for good points. Mark G didn’t control a city in the final round so decided to commit his Spartans to a single battle (worth 6 VPs), the one battle I had already committed to in starting the battle phase. I still had loads of military forces stacked up and the odds were comfortably in my favour before we started the die rolls. However, this was Mark G we were up against so the die rolls of course went his way. Although I did manage to scrape through a minor 3 VP skirmish elsewhere, I thought that I had managed to let the victory slip from my grasp. However, I had made sure that I was getting good points from my influence cubes and this was enough to allow me to scrape a hard fought victory. Even I hadn’t managed to lose it from my outstanding first round position.

I really enjoyed Perikles even though there was a fair degree of luck involved in resolving the battles. However, I didn’t feel the luck dominated and it was good that even an overwhelming force could still be outdone so nothing was completely certain. Others felt that the possibility of ending the game early spoilt it. It certainly would mean that some of the strategy would go missing but my view is that it adds another layer to think about as a perceived leader is likely to go for a quick win and the others need to deal with the short term threat to make sure that doesn’t happen. At around 3 hours, the game is possibly at the limit of acceptability timewise but I think this is one of Martin’s most approachable games with the rules and theme gelling well together to present a good challenge.

From the Warfrog website:

“Warfrog is going in a slightly different direction this year and will be releasing three limited first edition games. These will be part of the Treefrog Line.

1500 of each title will be printed. Each will be signed and numbered. The quality  of production will be up to usual Warfrog standards. However, all playing pieces will be wooden. There will be no cards, counters, or plastic pieces in any Treefrog Line game, (hence the label).

The first game will be Tinners’ Trail and should be out by the end of May 2008. Check here for more details about the game.

The next game will be set in ancient Mesopotamia. This will be for three players only and will be released in September/October 2008.

The final game will be a two player wargame on the battle of Waterloo. This should be released around January 2009.

After that Warfrog will repeat the pattern again, a multi-player game, a three player only game, and a two player wargame. This pattern will continue for five years at the very least.”