Lego Classic Board Games

by Susan Rozmiarek
I've seen a few children's board games using Legos in places like Toys R Us over the past few years, but nothing that looked interesting. Now it looks like they are coming out with a few classic games entirely (or almost) made with Legos.

Check them out here.

I like the Viking chess set. This makes me wonder what other games one could make out of Legos. Who needs that fancy, deluxe version of Settlers of Catan? Just make your own out of Legos!

National Games Week 2006

by Ed Rozmiarek
National Games Week is going to happen again in 2006. This year it is again going to be during the Thanksgiving week; November 19-25 to be exact. I think this is a pretty good time to have it since many families get together over the holiday week and the kids have extra time off from school. With a little extra effort you can turn that family gathering into a NGW event. Why do this? First off, to promote boardgames is the standard reason. But also, if you submit an after-action report, you will be entered into the NGW prize drawing. The top prize last year was pretty nice, a complete set of Avalon Hill games. We didn’t get the top prize but Susan did win a complete set of Palladium books.

You can visit the National Games Week website to get all of the details. You can also register your game group and/or NGW events at the site. I have already registered our traditional “Why Shop When You Can Game” Day as a NGW event. We hold this the day after Thanksgiving. While others are out fighting the crowds and starting the mad commercialism dash towards Christmas, we’re home with our friends relaxing and gaming.

IGA 2006 Finalists announced

by Ed Rozmiarek
The International Gamers Awards committee announced the finalists for the 2006 IGA in the General Strategy category over the weekend. This complete list of this year's nominees includes:

GENERAL STRATEGY GAMES - Multi Player category

Antike
Designer: Mac Gerdts
Publisher: Eggertspiele & Rio Grande Games

Blue Moon City
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Kosmos & Fantasy Flight Games

Caylus
Designer: William Attia
Publisher: Ystari Games & Rio Grande Games

The End of the Triumverates
Designers: Max Gabrian & Johannes Ackva
Publisher: Lookout Games & Z-Man Games

Hacienda
Designer: Wolfgang Kramer
Publisher: Hans im Gluck & Rio Grande Games

Indonesia
Designers: Joris Wiersinga & Jeroen Doumen
Publisher: Splotter Spellen

Jenseits von Theben
Designer: Peter Prinz
Publisher: Prinz Spiele

Mykerinos
Designer: Nicolas Oury
Publisher: Ystari Games & Rio Grande Games

Railroad Tycoon
Designers: Glenn Drover & Martin Wallace
Publisher: Eagle Games

Thurn und Taxis
Designers: Andreas & Karen Seyfarth
Publisher: Hans im Gluck & Rio Grande Games

To Court the King
Designer: Tom Lehmann
Publisher: Amigo & Rio Grande Games

GENERAL STRATEGY GAMES - 2 Player category

Aton
Designer: Thorsten Gimmler
Publisher: Queen Games & Rio Grande Games

Travel Blokus
Designer: Bernard Tavitian
Publisher: Educational Insights

Pünct
Designer: Kris Burm
Publisher: Don & Co. & Rio Grande Games

Twilight Struggle
Designers: Ananda Gupta & Jason Matthews
Publisher: GMT Games

War of the Ring: Battles of the 3rd Age
Designers: Marco Maggi, Francesco Nepitello & Roberto Di Meglio
Publisher: Nexus & Fantasy Flight Games

For a detailed look at the nominated games, as well as the committee members and their qualifications, please visit the International Gamers Awards website at: http://www.internationalgamersawards.net

The International Gamers Awards were created to recognize outstanding games and designers, as well as the companies that publish them. The awards are truly international in scope, with committee members representing countries throughout the world. The goal is to give greater exposure for these wonderful games to more and more people and help spread the word of the "wonderful world of gaming" on a global scale.

For more information, contact:
Greg J. Schloesser
greg@gschloesser.net
504-347-6097

Susan's Gulf Games Report - Part 3

by Susan Rozmiarek
Friday

I have long since stopped trying to compete in the “Friendly Gamer” contest which is won by the man, woman and child who play with the most different people over the course of the event. I am no match for the few who are really determined. However, I still try to mix with as many people as I can simply because I enjoy their company. Despite that, I always end up going home and regretting the fact that I didn’t spend enough time with certain folks. With that in mind, I hung out at the Pick Two table some today. This is where many of the Gulf Game women can be found, playing this evil word game. I’m pretty horrible at it but I’m determined to get better, even if I get an ulcer trying!

Pick Two x3

Hey, I actually didn’t come in last one game! I beat a 10 year old. I did have several low scoring rounds and a few proud moments, like forming the word “anthrax.” See, I am getting better!

Aqua Romana

This was the best of the newer games that I played, and one that immediately went on my buy list. It reminds me of Metro in that it is very tactical and has the goal of forming the longest routes, but there are a few twists to make this game different. We did play with one rule wrong, which would have given us more options and made it easier to hose people. The chunky wooden architects are nice, but the fact that they are “tilted” drove me nuts. It looks like the stickers are put on crooked and I kept wanting to fix them!

Kings & Castles

At long last, I got to play this older Ragnar Brothers game with Greg and Chris and Elaine Lohroff. This game, which for reasons unknown has managed to sit on our shelves for years, was the gaming highlight of the week for me. I knew I would like it from the description and in fact, I loved it. The turn order throughout the game is determined in a unique way at the start, with players choosing from the various kings of England listed along the sides of the board. These kings represent turns which are executed in the order that they are listed. Each also lists the region on the board in which a player can play that turn. I have a feeling that there is a lot more strategy in choosing these kings than is readily apparent with just one playing. The play is very puzzle-like, which I love, that involves both random elements as well as some resource management. There were a lot of opportunities to make clever plays if you were able to spot them. You are only allowed to tax (score) three times during the game and your score is based on the territories that you control. However, your opponents score as well although you get to double your score. I found it agonizing to decide when to tax. The biggest downside to the game was that there can be a lot of downtime between your turns. This doesn’t bother me as much as it does some people because I just use the time to socialize. I am definitely going to try to get this on the table again at home. I am kicking myself for waiting so long to try it.

Blokus Trigon x2

I am a Blokus junkie and this version is another worthy addition to the family. It feels different enough from the original and Gemblo to make it a keeper. Plus, it plays well with three players. It seemed to be quite popular as I saw our copy being played quite often.

Rüsselbande

Good grief. This is what can happen when you put an innocent children’s game in the hands of sleep-deprived adults in the wee hours of the morning. I got cajoled into playing this simple pig racing game as I was dragging myself out of the game room at an ungodly hour to go to bed. This is such a mindless game that I thought, “why not?” Oh, my. I knew those pigs could stack in all kinds of positions but I really had no idea. Naughty, NAUGHTY piggies!

Stay tuned for Part 4

Bison and Figaro - First Impressions

by Susan Rozmiarek
I’m going to interrupt my Gulf Games reports to comment on a few of the upcoming Mayfair releases. We hosted a game day yesterday and I was able to give them a whirl. After everyone left, I surfed on over to BGG to check out the ratings for these games and was especially surprised to see some lukewarm ratings for Bison which I thought was quite good. Perhaps more playings will reveal some flaws? At any rate, here are my initial impressions:

Bison: Thunder on the Prairie

Bison is a tile-laying, area majority game that reminds a bit of Carcassonne with a dash of Entdecker and Tikal. What it also has is an incredibly tight resource management system that had me agonizing over my decisions. I have grown tired with area majority control games and they were never my favorite type in the first place. However, this one impressed me quite a bit. Briefly the game plays as follows:

The playing area will be formed during the game by playing oddly shaped tiles that depict different landscape types and associated wild game- turkeys, fish and bison. As the regions grow, players will fight to control the most valuable ones, those with the most animals. Like Carcassonne, when a player places a tile, he can place his hunters on one of the landscape types depicted. Then, with various actions, he can move hunters around (Tikal) and establish teepees on land or canoes on water for majority control in the regions of a single landscape type that form during the game. The majority scoring works a lot like it does in Entdecker – a single, higher valued teepee or canoe beats any number of lower valued ones or hunters. The game is played in “seasons” in which players take exactly four actions, one-by-one, in turn order. At the end of a season, players collect their hunting bounty for the season. They will get the number of turkeys, fish and bison depicted in the areas that they control. Players in 2nd down to fourth place will also potentially receive animals as well. This is where the tight resource management comes into play. Every action that involves more than one hunter will involve a cost in animals. The costs of actions depend on the number of hunters involved and are the same for each action, making it simple to remember. Placing two hunters on a tile costs the same as moving two hunters which costs the same as replacing two hunters with a two-valued canoe. The price rises sharply as more hunters are used. It also costs animals to buy more canoes, hunters and teepees from the market to use on the board. A varying amount of all three types of animals is needed, so you must have a supply of each and can’t focus on a single type. I found myself constantly having to scrimp and manage my animals as I never had enough.

The winner is determined after four seasons in a four-player game and is the player who is able to hunt the most animals at that time. Animals saved over from previous seasons don’t count. At the end of the game, players lose the animals that they still have and then score the territories. Whoever has the most animals wins the game.

Another cool feature that I liked in the game is the fact that players can only take each action once during a season. So, if I am fighting an opponent for control of a river, I can check whether or not he’s used the “build canoe” action this season and evaluate what course of action I might take to guarantee my success. Between trying to manage my animal supply and keeping a constant eye on what actions my opponents still have available to them, I found the game to be quite challenging with lots of agonizing decisions.

Bison does have some luck with randomly drawn tiles and it’s very dry with a theme doesn’t always make sense (for example, teepees and canoes cannot ever move once placed. Huh?), but I was quite impressed with the game. There is, as is usual in games of this type, a lot of potential for the dreaded “analysis paralysis” problem. But, despite the fact that I’ve played dozens of area majority games over the years, this one felt original even with some familiar mechanisms. There definitely seemed to be enough there to keep those who like “gamer’s games” happy and it lived up to my expectations of a Kramer/Kiesling collaboration. The others at the table were rather impressed with it as well. The game is also quite beautiful with art by Franz Vohwinkel. I hope to write a full review of it after I’ve played it several more times.

Bison board at end of game.

Figaro

The other new Mayfair game that I got to play was Figaro, which I played twice. I always approach daVinci games with trepidation because many of them don’t click with me. However, I had more hope for Figaro because it’s designed by Reiner Knizia. I wasn’t as “wowed” by it as I was with Bison, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would after reading the rules. It’s very light and a bit chaotic, but there are some nuances to the game that were not immediately apparent. It appears to me that Mr. Knizia took the core mechanism - that of playing cards to piles until they all added up to a certain value and then had to be taken by a player - and then developed several games with it. Too Many Cooks, Poison, and now Figaro joins this group of games. It is a “take that” sort of game as you are playing cards directly on players to try and force them to collect cards when the value of their pile reaches six. In this game, collecting cards is bad. I was a little afraid that there would be too much piling on the leader, but it all seemed to work pretty well. Some of the plays are driven by trying to save one’s self from taking cards, rather than hurting a particular player.

The theme is silly and one that has really been forced on, making little sense in how it relates to some of the mechanisms. I’d love to know what Mr. Knizia’s original theme for it was, because surely this can’t be it. I’m not going to bother trying to explain it other than it takes place in the King Me! world; I’ll save that for a review. It does make for some cute, whimsical art, though. I really liked the illustrations. Fortunately, theme does not matter so much to me, especially in a light and quick game such as this one.

I haven’t decided if I like the odd way of scoring, but I will say that it does make the game stand out which perhaps was the intention. Road tiles of random lengths are drawn at the beginning of the game and grouped in sets, one for each round. Losers in each round take the longer segments while the winner takes none. At the end of the game, everyone places their segments together to form a road and the player with the shortest road wins. This seemed rather fiddly, but I guess it works. All-in-all, this is a nice, light filler that I’m looking forward to playing more. It may be a game that I tire of after a half dozen plays or it could be the next filler favorite of the gaming group. We’ll see.

Some of the Figaro cards.

Gulf Games 18 pictures

by Ed Rozmiarek
Finally... pant, pant, pant... I have finished the captions for our Gulf Games pictures. If you haven't already checked them out, you can find them in the Gulf Games 18 picture album. Leave a comment on a picture if it has incorrect information. Also, if you are in a picture and do not want it on the web, let me know.

Enjoy!

Susan's Gulf Games Report - Part 2

by Susan Rozmiarek
The next two days were the most intense, gaming-wise. Ed and I did take time out to enjoy several meals with other folks at nearby restaurants. I always greatly look forward to these enjoyable opportunities to get to know people away from the gaming table.

Thursday

Viva Topo!

Take Midnight Party and replace Hugo the Ghost with a cat and the partygoers with mice ducking into rooms to get cheese, and you have this wildly overproduced Selecta game. But boy, are the bits nice. The game is actually a little better than Midnight Party, because there is more of a push-your luck element. The rooms furthest away have more cheese, so you can stay out longer and try to get to them at the risk of getting eaten by the bad ol’ kitty. If my kids were younger, I would buy this in a heartbeat. If it wasn’t so expensive, I’d buy it anyway because it is a nice little filler for adults.

Au Backe!

This is a simple memory game of flipping cards and trying to get pairs. It’s nothing special, but the kids that I played with enjoyed it.

Expedition

This is a sentimental game from my early days of eurogaming. I don’t think that I’ll ever tire of it. It’s yet another twist on a connection game and I adore those. I’ve always wished I could read the German text about all those neat places depicted on the cards. Lo and behold, after we were finished I spied a copy of the new National Geographic version sitting on someone’s pile of games. There have been some changes to the map, but all the cards were in English. Sweet. I found a copy online but it was pretty pricey for a game we already have. Should I get it? It’s tempting.

Rum & Pirates

I taught this to Ed, Sarah Samuelson, and Peter and Kim McCarthy. This playing went much more quickly than my first, but it was still a little too long. I’m wondering if making it one round shorter would fix the game length without having a negative impact on the game play. Others that played the game, however, claimed they clocked in at about 45 minutes which would be just the right amount of time for this. Still, I think everyone playing enjoyed it.

Ticket to Ride: Switzerland

This was a “homemade” copy of a map for exactly three players that is only available on the Ticket to Ride PC game. My opponents were Alan Moon and Kim Berg. Now, I figured that Alan would whoop up on Kim and me as I’m sure that he’s played the game a couple of times. What I did not know until we sat down and starting setting it up was that Kim has played the computer version approximately 979 times. A day. Okay, I’m only kidding but she’s played it enough to know the individual personalities of the AI opponents. So, I was sunk before ever leaving the dock. As I was getting used to the foreign map and making good progress toward connecting my destination cities, Alan and Kim started a flurry of destination ticket drawing and quickly sucked up most of the deck. My conservative play of waiting until late in the game to draw more tickets has served me well in the past with the original game so I was mildly panicked. By the time I started drawing new tickets, they were about gone. Also, there are apparently some key routes on this map that need to be grabbed early. I didn’t. Despite my drubbing (about 60 points behind the other two!), it was highly amusing to see Kim beat Alan, apparently for the second time. I ordered a copy of the PC game immediately when we got home so I can practice in secret and get my revenge at the next Gulf Games!

Ark

Sarah and Dillon Samuelson wanted to play this game with experienced players. Ed and I were happy to oblige, although we aren’t all that experienced. Still, we’ve played it enough to be comfortable with the rules as long as we have a player’s aid in front of us. I’ve played this game several times now and I still can’t decide if I like it our not. I’m now over the hump of learning all the fiddly placement rules and I really enjoy the puzzle of placing cards. I just don’t like the majority scoring for some reason. I’d enjoy the game a lot more if you simply scored straight points for placing animals or won by getting rid of all your cards or something. If I had a designer bone in my body I’d be hard at work tweaking this one but alas, I don’t. I actually won this game, one of my few wins the entire week.

Russian Rails

Getting to play a crayon rail game with fans of the genre was a rare treat for me. This game has been sitting unplayed on our shelves for a while now so I brought it along in the hopes that I find some opponents. I was delighted when Joe Huber asked me to play with him and Jim McDanold. Thor, who had never played one of these games before, joined us as well. The twist with the Russian version is that many of the event cards have dual events, one for both before and after the fall of communism. A card that indicates the fall of communism is randomly shuffled in to the deck. The event that takes place depends on whether this card has been drawn yet or not. There are also some other rules that make things more difficult if communism falls. The card never got drawn in our game but just the threat provided some nice tension toward the end. Thor and Joe had a pretty tight battle for first place with Joe emerging victorious. The game took two-and-a-half hours, not including the rules explanation, which wasn’t bad. We were slow due to not being familiar with Russian geography, but that was countered some by Joe’s fast Huber-speed play.