Moving on, I was of course very happy to see a positive review and high scores (one 7, six 8s and three 9s) for the Portuguese history themed Navegador, a game Mac Gerdts first presented at LeiriaCon, Portugal’s largest boardgame meeting.

Another of this issue’s delights is a small advert for the appropriately-named Alea Apartments in a Greek island, where holiday makers can use the owner’s boardgame collection.

The issue’s contents is as follows, with underlined games getting high scoring reviews.

• News:
  • the As d’Or goes to Skulls & Roses, while 7 Wonders receives a special award
  • the 23rd Hippodice contest and its strong winner, Afrika 1830, a game about the ruthless colonial politics and exploitation in Africa
• Long reviews: Settlers of Catan–The quick card game, 1655–Habemus Papam, Black Friday, Firenze, Grand Cru, Navegador, The Great Fire of London, Skull & Roses, Alien Frontiers, Key Market
• Short reviews: Water Lily, Take it or leave it, High Five, Busstop: the Boardgame, Alex & Co
• Children’s games: Flucht vor dem T-Rex, tiptoi–Die Englisch Detektive, Was ist das?, Domory, Der Waldspaziergang
• Profiles:
  • interview of Ulrich Blum, author of Grand Cru
  • interview of the spokesman of the Spiel des Jahres jury on the creation of their new award “Connoisseur Game of the Year”
• Reports:
  • 14 pages about the board and card games at Nuremberg’s Toy Fair, with comments on expansions and remakes
  • 15th anniversary of the German edition of Wizard
• Edition spielbox 92: Great Western, a railway game by Martin Wallace for 2-4 players
• History: Meltdown, a not very good game about management of nuclear reactors
• Books: “Five cows walking on a road…”, a book for training creativity by Joachim Zischke, author of expensive topological games
• Playing better: player aids for Black Friday and Troyes

The report on Essen also includes a short profile on Jussi Auto and his Finnish company, Tuonela Productions. Moreover, I couldn’t help notice a 2-page advert for Korean games in this issue. One of the reviewed games (K2) is Polish. And past reviews include Czech game, for example. Boardgame design and publishing is definitely becoming global and (sometimes, as in the case of Caravelas and Vinhos) multi-cultural.

Apropos Vinhos, its failure to be sold at Essen due to production delays was apparently not a single case. This issue’s editorial notes that more than a dozen (!) of the games bought for the spielbox office had production problems: defective boards, missing pieces, etc. The editorial notes how many publishers (especially new ones) are pressing themselves to present one or more novelties at each SPIEL and thereby run into all kinds of quality problems (e.g. rules with errors and omissions) to the point of having no game to present, in the extreme cases. Why gamble on quality when there is so much competition nowadays?

The issue’s contents is as follows, with underlined games getting high scoring reviews.

• News: the Asmodée/Staupe conflict and the role of publishers in defending designers from copycats
• Long reviews: Asara, Pillars of the Earth – The card game, Safranito, K2, LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts, Thunderstone, Dominant Species
• Short reviews: Chicago Express expansion, Hexenflug, aufRuhr!, Perpetual-Motion Machine, Sticht oder nicht, Stich-Meister, Cinco
• Children’s games: Die kleinen Zauberlehrlinge, Kleine Froschmusik / Karla Kuchenfee, Mit Felix durch Deutschland, Käse Kaos, findevier
• Profiles:
  • interview of Wolfgang Kramer about Asara
  • interview of Michael Rieneck about Pillars of the Earth – The card game
• Reports:
  • SPIEL’11 in Essen (over 20 pages!)
  • a new series of classic games from around the world, chosen by children
• Edition spielbox: Christmas Tree, an expansion for Zooloretto
• History:
  • oldie: Tyranno Ex!, the not so serious game about evolution
  • word games, part 2: some curious word games, which e.g. combine mechanics from other types of games

On Thursday I met Tiago from MESAboardgames, which have edited a string of family games with Portuguese themes. He had come to Lisbon for a meeting with an organization for which they’re developing a corporate game and he brought my pre-ordered copy of Caravelas, which Matt wasn’t able to pick up in Essen because he had already his luggage full of games for himself. So, in the end I still managed to get the Essen deal (game + expansion for a reduced price) without paying postage. I only had to follow that old proverb: ‘if the game will not come to Michel, Michel will go to the game’.

On Friday I packed my big suitcase with several kilos of my father’s 30+ year old Fleischmann model train. It had taken him days to rummage the attic for it, and I had to leave back in Lisbon almost as much material as I brought. In particular, the beautiful steam locomotive had to go to the shop for repair. We should have a quote in two weeks, let’s hope it’s not dearer than buying a new one… The rest of the material also has some problems, e.g. the turnout points can get stuck, but considering its age, I certainly won’t complain. I was only sad one coupler of the brown freight wagon on the photo broke during the trip, but considering the ‘careful’ way luggage is handled at airports, it could have been worse.

Yesterday, my youngest daughter and I put together a simple oval as a first test, followed by the track on the left, which showcases some of the tried and tested analogue electro-mechanical technology that has been in the Fleischmann catalogue for decades. My daughter put down the track and built the ‘tunnel’, I did the wiring. It was great fun, and a trip down memory lane to when I was about her age and played with my father. I guess history does repeat itself. Now we have to move onwards to more challenging layouts…

The report about the UK Games Expo concludes that while it won’t become a competitor to SPIEL in Essen, the Expo’s small size makes it a better alternative to try out prototypes and talk to game designers.

The commentary on Germany’s Game of the Year Award points out that the only constant throughout the years is the unpredictability of the jury: this year a communication game (Dixit) won the award, while in past years that kind of game often didn’t even make it into the jury’s recommended games list.

The news about a multi-player game timer that has come on the market makes clear it’s the ideal accessory for people playing with me, as Matt pointed out. Although he didn’t put it quite this way, he suggested I should buy it to work on my innate ability to take ages to finish my turns. I had to explain it was a deliberate strategy to nerve my opponents and obtain a competitive advantage to offset my natural tendency towards low scores.

The issue’s contents is as follows, with underlined games getting high scoring reviews.

• News:
  • the Game of the Year Award results
  • the DGT Cube, a multi-player game timer
  • the 29th edition of the Göttingen meeting gathers 164 game designers, and the 3000 Euro training stipend for yet unpublished authors goes to a school teacher
• Long reviews: Titania, Glen More, Long Shot, Velo City, Revolution!, Identik, Samarkand, Schlag den Raab, Workshop of the World, Tammany Hall, Asteroyds, Claustrophobia
• Short reviews: 11 nimmt!, Basket Boss, 20.000 Meilen unter dem Meer
• Children’s games: Schatz der Kobolde, Vampire der Nacht, Kleine Magier, Panic Tower, Mein Mäuschen-Farbspiel
• Profiles:
  • Bruce Allen and the story behind his first game, Tobago
  • Frank Czarnetzki, the owner of LudoArt, which tries to develop games that are art objects too
  • Harald Mücke, seller of game materials and publisher
• Reports: UK Games Expo 2010 in Birmingham
• Edition spielbox: Side Dish, an expansion for A la Carte
• History:
  • oldie: Dungeon and its successors (Drachen-Labyrinth, Dungeon Twister, Claustrophobia)
  • abstract games: where movement depends on position, e.g. Bantu, Ins+Outs, Energizer, LOA, Sabotage, Epaminondas, etc.
  • for collectors: seafaring games
• Variants: different winning conditions and a variant for Velo City

The Game

In Norenberc, there are various guilds (bakers, paper makers, etc.), their craftsmen and the corresponding goods (bread, paper, etc.).  The goal is to hire the best craftsmen of each guild and to gather crests (from the guilds and special ones). By the end of the game VPs are awarded for various conditions. For example, each craftsman is worth a certain number and for each guild the player with the highest sum gets 5VP (2nd placed 3VP, 3rd placed 1V). Additionally, each player gets VPs for the number of different crests they have. There are also special professionals who give bonuses at the end of the game (e.g. extra VP or an extra crest) or immediately (e.g. the thief allows to steal goods from another player).

Goods are needed to hire people and money is needed to buy goods. Money can be obtained by selling goods or hiring people late: you get one coin for each action that has been taken previously in that round in the guildhall from which you’re hiring. And how are actions recorded? By using the usual worker placement mechanism. Each player starts with 4 workers and then all players decide secretly in which guildhalls they will enact their workers (to buy or sell products or hire people). Some people, when hired, allow a player to immediately get an extra worker. The worker stays until the end of the round in the guildhall where it was used and this enables one to quickly see how much income a hiring will generate, namely the number of workers present.

A second kind of majority control is needed to obtain guild crests:  at the end of each round, whoever has the majority of goods of a guild receives the corresponding crest, and also one craftsman. There are only as many rounds as there are guilds (4 in a 3-player game), hence only a few chances to get a guild’s crest. Getting multiple crests of the same guild doesn’t bring any extra VPs. In other words, you should on average get a different guild crest each round or else you’ll lose VPs badly, i.e. you should diversify in each round the majority of goods you hold. Furthermore, in each round a person becomes cheaper to hire (one less good required), finally being ‘evicted’ from the guildhall after some rounds, a mechanism similar to St. Petersburg.

The Review

By now you must have the same the same feeling I had as the game was explained to me: this is all very deja vu, a mixture of familiar mechanisms, the old boring ‘place workers to transform money into resources and transform resources into something else that will give VPs’ kind of game. I was fearing it would drag on like Caylus, or be a bad pot-pourri like Endeavour, two games I don’t particularly enjoy.  However, I quite liked Noremberc. Why?

First, it’s not a very long game, even for slow thinkers like me, because there are only a handful of rounds, in each round you only take as many actions as the workers you have, and for each action you have only 3 options (buy, sell, hire). All this provides enough challenge (go to the right guildhalls in the right order, time your hirings, watch what the others are doing to avoid fighting for the same majority in each round, etc.) but is not too complex to get into analysis-paralysis mode. Of course, there were still times where I held up the game (but Susan and David were too polite to point that out, contrary to some other more bantering-prone club members), especially when the craftsman or good I wanted had just been acquired by the previous player. It requires thinking on your feet to get a viable Plan B quickly, something I struggle with.

Second, the various mechanisms work well together and it all makes sense for the theme: building a powerhouse of craftsmen from all guilds. Of course, you have to take ‘makes sense’ with a large pinch of salt, it’s a German Eurogame after all. For example, I wish in real life you could hire bakers for a loaf of bread. But overall, it’s a tightly knit game, with some counter-balancing mechanisms. For example, whoever has the majority of a good, and gets the corresponding crest at the end of a round, must return one of those goods to the guildhall, thus making it more difficult for someone to hold on to their goods majority for several rounds. Nevertheless, David managed to do exactly that: he had the boots majority in the first 3 rounds. Susan got it in the last round through a precisely timed hiring of the thief, which enabled her to snatch 2 boots from David and turn the tables around.

Third, the game is tense throughout, but with a peak at the end, like all good games: whoever has the majority of a good in the last round, gains two instead of one craftsmen of the corresponding guild, which can completely change who gets the 5VP for the best craftsmen in that guild. The tension comes from the scarcity of goods and money (leading to weary fights for majority) and from having to make simultaneous decisions on where to place workers (leading to quick tactical changes when different players choose the same guildhall). Despite being very tactical, one can outline some strategies at the beginning of each round, based on the distribution of goods among the players and guildhalls and the people available for hiring. One key strategy is to try to obtain extra workers as fast as possible. I was lucky that many of the special professionals that provide extra workers came out in the first round and I could grab them  largely unchallenged by Susan and David. By the second round I had 7 actions per round, which came very handy to buy more goods, hire more craftsmen, and ultimately win the game (with 39VP, against David’s 31 and Susan’s 29), in spite of practically running out of money and goods (and hence options) in the last round. But due to the extra workers, I could first hire a craftsman and get extra money, and then spend it on the loafs necessary to get the bread majority. This gave me two crests and two extra bakers, and hence several VPs. The photo shows my final situation.

Overall, a challenging but not too complex game that cleverly and smoothly combines some familiar mechanisms into a swift gameplay. I dare say that it can satisfy both those who’d like a medium weight economic game and those who’d like an introduction to the worker placement and the economic resource management types of games. I certainly look forward to playing again this game and, after also enjoying Hansa Teutonica, I’m piqued to try further games by Andreas Steding.

The Dessert

We then played Cartagena (David brought the beautiful 2010 reprint), one of my most played and favourite games (see ‘Games I like’ on the sidebar). David was kind enough to move ahead and occupy several places with the same symbol, making it easy for me to use the cards I accumulated throughout the game to move my pirates from well behind quickly into the boat.

This was one of my shortest game nights ever (I left before 10pm), but it was highly enjoyable, with one new game and an old familiar one, both very good in their own genres.

It’s also clear spielbox is covering more games that are not available in German, maybe because of the magazine’s English edition.

I couldn’t help noting that two of the games in this issue (Rattus and The Plague) are about an uncommon theme, The Black Plague, but I won’t take it as a signal that it will become popular

Another curious coincidence: a review on a game I just played two days ago, Ascension. The reviewer notes that the game lacks depth and that its fantasy theme is completely irrelevant, but praises the rulebook and the game’s simplicity, giving it a score of 7/10. I wholeheartedly agree with everything, except that it deserves such a high score.

The editor-in-chief comments on the German Game Award results, writing that the top 10 voted games make for one of the most uniform lists ever, with most games being of the VP-gathering kind, with similar mechanics; cooperative, communication or dexterity games are absent. The magazine presents the 2010 and 2009 lists side by side and it’s plain to see that last year was far more interesting, with games as diverse as Dominion, Le Havre, Pandemic and Small World. He also notes that the winner (Fresco) beat the second placed (Vasco da Gama) by the narrowest margin ever in the award’s history. Darn! Well, at least I did my bit by voting for VdG and Macao, which also made the top 10.

The issue’s contents is as follows, with underlined games getting high scoring reviews.

• News:
  • the German Game Award results
  • the world’s largest Puzzle: 32,256 pieces and 17kg heavy!
• Long reviews:  The Mines of Zavandor, Jerusalem, Vor den Toren von Loyang, Rattus, Cyclades, Frag Gold Edition, Shipyard, Snapshot, Catacombs, Horus Heresy, Settlers of America, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
  
• Short reviews: Dominion:The Alchemists, Wobble, Hotel Checkout, Caminos, Haflinger & Co.
  
• Children’s games: MauseSause, Pirate Plank, Die Alphas, Wortwal, Kim & Tim, Einfach klasse in Mathematik
  
• Profiles:
  • Claus Stephan: a graphic designer explains how he developed the art concept for Loch Ness
  • Inka and Markus Brand, a game designer couple (Guatemala Café, A Castle for all Seasons, etc.)
• Reports:
  • the opinions of players, authors and publishers on environmentally friendly games
  • the Wizard world cup final in Castle Frankenstein
• Edition spielbox:
  • The Plague, a Carcassonne expansion
  • ‘Revolution’, a special card for Wizard Extreme
    
• History:
  • oldie: Crokinole
  • word games: Scrabble, Typ Dom, Boggle, Runes/Buzzle, etc.
  • an overview of several Carcassonne expansions (part 2)
  • the roots of Martin Wallace’s London
  • for collectors: the games of publisher Bütehorn (late 70s and early 80s)

Michael, the game’s owner, explained us the rules, which are fairly simple. One player (Michael in this case) plays the monster lord and its minions, while each of the other players takes the role of a human: Mark was the brave knight in shining armour, Graham was the attractive female thief, and I was the old hapless wizard. The game is played on a board depicting a dungeon, the monsters aiming to kill the humans before they find three treasures — aah, the good ol’ universal themes of greed and survival. Each character (human or not) can move a certain number of hexagons per turn, and has a certain number of attack and defense points. Whenever two characters are adjacent, they can battle: the attacker throws a die, adds it to the character’s attack points, and the total is compared against the defender’s die throw plus defense points. If the attacker wins, the defender takes one hit. Each character can take a certain number of hits before it’s dead. Moreover, there are cards that give extra defence or attack capabilities, recover from hits taken, bring new minions on the board, etc.

As one can see, the game is neither original nor complex, but it’s good fun. As the cover image indicates, the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, poking fun at the usual Dungeons&Dragons-style conventions. The illustrations and text on the cards are quite funny, and whacking Goblins, Orcs & Co. is always a good pastime. Nevertheless, the game is quite challenging: it’s very hard for three humans to defeat all those monsters that just won’t stop coming into the dungeon. Our valiant knight bravely took many monsters on his own and was the first to bite the dust. Graham had to leave and so Mark took on the thief role but by then we were surrounded by monsters and it was a matter of rounds until it was over. At least we earned the ‘pesky’ adjective and  dispatched several monsters into oblivion. On hindsight, we should have moved more quickly at the beginning, to collect all special defence and attack bonuses before battling the monsters, and we shouldn’t have spent so many of our cards so soon. Oh well, there’s always a ‘next time…’.

We then played another game Michael brought, the pompously named Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, which is basically a Dominion-style game, with three types of cards: monsters, heroes and constructs. Each hero and construct card costs a certain number of runes to acquire, and provides zero or more strength points, which are required to defeat monsters. Each defeated monster brings the player a certain amount of victory points. Construct cards, once played from the hand, remain on the table and hence in effect every turn.

The image shows one of the constructs I had: it cost me 4 runes to acquire (upper right corner), it brought me two VPs at the end of the game (lower left corner), and it gave me every turn one strength point and the ability to acquire 3 VPs for 4 runes. A very handy card that I often used whenever I had not enough strength points to defeat a monster that would bring me more than 3 VPs. This was possibly the card that enabled me to win the game with 64 VPs, against Mark’s 53 and Michael’s 50 VPs. I suppose the sentence at the bottom of each card is just to make us feel all ‘kung-fuey and mystical’, in the words of Po, the kung-fu panda.

Ascension is a rather easy game: use all the runes and strength points that you have in your hand and table cards to defeat monsters and acquire further cards; put all those cards into your discard pile; take another 5 cards from your draw pile for your next turn; if your draw pile is exhausted, take the discard pile and shuffle it; repeat ad nauseam, as in Dominion.

There are three major differences with respect to Dominion. First, VPs are kept separate from the cards’ abilities, which means that obtaining VPs doesn’t weaken your deck. Second, there is only a limited choice of cards that can be acquired or defeated at any time, each card taken being immediately replaced from a shuffled draw pile, while in Dominion all cards are known and available from the start. Third, there is no limitation on the actions that can be taken in each turn: just look at the available heroes, constructs and monsters and try to spend all the runes and strength points you have on them. This makes Ascension a very light game with hardly any tactics or strategy as far as I could see. Add to this a useless board, an irrelevant ‘theme’, an even more automatic game play than Dominion because there are few tough choices, and you know I’ll try to avoid playing this again. Sorry, Michael.

The spielbox reviews are just one reviewer’s opinions, while BoardGameGeek provides many reviews on the same game: one gets a diversity of opinions that spielbox simply can’t compete with. Also, BGG doesn’t have space constraints: many reviews are considerably longer, and hence more detailed and in depth, than the 1 to 3 page reviews in spielbox. Last but not least, I often don’t quite understand the game descriptions in spielbox; maybe my German is not good enough, or the limited space forces the reviewers into terse descriptions, but I certainly don’t have a such a problem with the many great BGG reviewers.

I would therefore like spielbox to provide me the overview, the ‘backstage’ and the historical perspective on games, their designers and the industry, that the many scattered forums of BGG can’t. BGG is full of nice trees, but spielbox could show us the forest. Alas, most readers said in the last spielbox survey they wanted more reviews. The editor in chief then commented on the survey, remarking that the reviewers of spielbox have decades of professional experience and insight that most BGG users haven’t. Now, in this issue’s editorial, titled  ‘Our ordeals with the scoring’, he justifies how more and more spielbox collaborators don’t provide a numeric score (from 0 to 10) on the game they try out, because with so many more games to review, it’s hard to play each one often enough to give it a fair score. Also, with more games on the market for the spielbox reviewers to cover, it becomes harder for a game to get more than one score (the one from the review’s author). I rest my case on spielbox vs BGG.

So, it will be bye-bye from me to spielbox in 2011. I shall miss the non-review articles, but the scant pages (and getting fewer…) dedicated to them are not worth  €46 a year.

Well, back to this issue. The contents is as follows, with underlined games getting high scoring reviews.

• News:
  • the re-edition of the 1980s Magier trilogy by the Rüttinger brothers
  • the Children’s Game of the Year Award goes for the second time to Manfred Ludwig and for the third time to Haba
  • Charles S. Roberts, the first to publish a wargame, dies at 80
  • issue 50 of the German Culture Committee newsletter includes articles on games
• Long reviews:  Chocolatl, Drachenherz, Saustall, Mystery Express, Don Quixote, The Club, Na so was, Level X, Recicle, Age of Industry, Innovation, Stronghold
  
• Short reviews: Valdora extra, Martinique, Langfinger, Schweinebande, Krysis, Der Heidelbär
• Children’s games: Mäusezocken, Würfel-Memo, Erzähl doch mal…, Inspektor Hase, Shaun das Shaf – Echt Shaf!
• Reports:
  • Origins 2010 and how it differs from Spiel in Essen
  • Game designer meeting in Göttingen: the harsh reality of getting your games published
• Edition spielbox: Balneator, a race game for 2 players by Andreas Rhode
• History:
  • several relatively recent abstract games: Dvonn, Diam, Gygès, Ponte del Diavolo, etc.
  • an overview of several Carcassonne expansions (part 1)
  • for collectors: the games of Wolfgang Grosskopf, a teacher in the former German Democratic Republic
• Variants: for Revolution

Genoa seems to be a game that doesn’t get easily repetitive because it gives players so much leeway with respect to trading, strategy and tactics, which in turn means that each play with a different group of people can be quite a different experience.

David and Susan depended on André to take them home and had to wait for him to finish a marathon game of Dominant Species with Big Nick and Michael. So, we next played two rounds of Category 5 (6 nimmt). Meanwhile, other games were finishing, and Mark and Manuela joined us for a game of Vampire. The game’s ‘theme’ is pointless. Suffice to say there are 6 suits of cards, each card being worth 1 or 2 points, and that each player’s goal is to put down a set of at least 3 cards, as valuable as possible, in each suit. Cards cannot be added to sets once they’re formed on the table. At the end of the game, for each suit, whoever has the least valuable set has to discard those cards; all other cards’ points are then added up. During the game there is a face down draw pile, and one face up discard pile per suit. On your turn, you take two cards from the draw pile or you take one complete discard pile. You then either discard a card from your hand or else put down a set of cards. If you take the discard pile of a suit, you must use it to form a set, possibly with additional cards from your hand.

In the first game we were cautious and only formed sets with a reasonable number of points to make sure our own sets would not be the least valuable ones and become worthless at the end. However, it turned out that for each suit there was at least one player who had not formed a set in that suit, which meant that everyone scored the cards in their sets. Since the game ends as soon as the draw pile is exhausted or someone forms a set in each suit, for the second game I tried to make low value sets as fast as possible to force the game’s end before anybody else had accumulated many points. Easier said than done, because it was easy for the others to spot the strategy and try to ‘starve’ me of the suits I still needed, by hoarding them in their hands and then forming sets. Nevertheless, I had a quite better score in the second game, which means the strategy is not too bad. I just have to execute it better next time, maybe by only starting to form sets when I have at least two cards of each suit in my hand. Overall, a nice little filler from Knizia that plays fast and demands some non-trivial choices, but by far not his best game.