The SPIEL in Essen is a special event for board gamers all over the world. Especially for us Europeans, of[…]
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Category: Featured
Rattle, Battle, Grab the Loot
Ignacy Trzewiczek and Portal Games are usually known for heavy games, but with Rattle, Battle, Grab the Loot they ventured into family game territory. Here you wage sea battles by throwing a metric ton of dice into the game box and then using more or less improbable ship upgrades to fight. For family-friendliness, players don’t fight against one another but compete who can capture or sink the most non-player ships.
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Tokaido – Collectors’ Edition
Usually, when a game is about traveling a road, you win by arriving first at the destination. Of course racing is fun, but it’s not the only way to travel. Sometimes, going slowly and enjoying the trip is what you should be doing. Antoine Bauza’s Tokaido rewards that type of travel, here the winner is the player who had the richest experience along the way. That makes Tokaido very different from a racing game, and in the best way, too.
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A Game of Gnomes
Every year Fragor Games releases one game, designed by the Lamont brothers and produced with ridiculously pretty ceramic miniatures. Last year, that game was A Game of Gnomes. It’s what it says on the box: a game, and about gnomes. Except the title and some puns in the rule book, it has nothing to do with that other A Game of …. Something that everyone is talking about, but it has a lot to do with mushrooms. And it has the largest single component in any game we have here at the Meeple Cave.
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Among Nobles
Building a dynasty of nobles, how much drier can the concept of a game possibly sound. Have children, marry them to other families, repeat until rich and and famous. I was happy to find out that this prejudice was dead wrong. Despite its theme, Among Nobles is anything but dry, it has a great balance of simple rules, strategic decision and player interaction.
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The Prodigals Club
Being rich, influential and groomed for political office, that must be such an incredibly boring life. Why is it that the lower classes get all the fun? Well, you’re not going to let them have it without you, and if you have to get rid of your wealth and your good reputation to join them, then so be it. That’s why you and some equally rich and dimwitted friends started the Prodigals Club, a contest of who can most effectively ruin their future.
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Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King
I admit, I didn’t expect that one day a traditional, competitive eurogame would be in the majority for the Kennerspiel des Jahres selection. But here we are, next to Pandemic Legacy and T.I.M.E. Stories, both cooperative games with a limited number of replays in the box Isle of Skye is the only competitive game with virtually unlimited replayability. Lets have a look if it’s worthy of the nomination.
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Raid & Trade
World War 3 has come and gone, and to everyone’s surprise we’re not extinct. But the planet is not a great place to live any more, except for those select few that secured a space in the Golden City, the last beacon of civilization in the world. All the wastelanders want to live there, and the players in Raid & Trade actually have the chance to achieve that dream, if they find the right mix between cooperation and ruthlessness.
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Imhotep
The problems with building pyramids don’t start with stacking big stones on top of other big stones. Sure, that’s one problem, but when you get to that point you solved a couple of other things already. Like how to get big stones when all you see around is sand. That part of the operation is the focus of Phil Walker-Harding’s Imhotep: get stones from the quarries down the Nile and to the construction sites, on ships you have to share with other architects working on the same project.
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The Game
This is the game you will never find on Google. Because the name of the game is The Game, and that’s just not very distinctive. The Game is a cooperative card game that was nominated for the 2015 Spiel des Jahres. It’s small and abstract, but that doesn’t say anything about how much fun it is.
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