It’s October, which means it’s time for another SPIEL and another SPIEL report!

As a small spoiler for what comes next, the picture of this year’s haul:

Next Station: Berlin

Next Station: Berlin is a new iteration of the Next Station games (which already span multiple metro networks – London, Paris, Tokyo). At every round, players get a colored pencil with which they draw a metro line according to constraints given by a deck of cards; there’s 4 rounds and at each round the pencils change hands (so that players get to draw metro lines in four different colors). The specificity of the Berlin map is that it’s separated between west and east, and players get more points if they manage to connect the stations of their lines in east and west. It’s a perfectly fine game! We do have a copy of the London version at home, though, and it makes it hard to justify getting another version.

Akropolis: Pantheon

Pantheon is an expansion for Akropolis, which we did get in Essen a few years ago and play somewhat regularly (and we happened to play twice quite recently). It’s a cooperative expansion: players build a city all together in the center, but to be able to mark any points, they need to fulfill quests in their own cities. It’s really well made, and while we try to avoid game expansions in general (in our experience, they rarely get played), we got a copy. (It’s also playable solo, which is a plus in my book.)

Microlonies

In Microlonies, players control colonies of ants. A mancala mechanic gives them more or less points to carry one of four actions – get eggs, grow your nest, explore or hunt. It looked quite nice, but the people we were playing with were only interested in playing a few rounds, and I would have liked to see the whole game to make a better informed decision on whether I liked it. It looked quite cool.

Wingspan Pocket

Wingspan Pocket was on the list of games I really wanted to have a look at if I had the opportunity, and I did get the opportunity! It’s presented as a streamlined, much shorter version of Wingspan, and it does deliver. There’s a deck of cards, and cards can either be used on their bird or food side. At a player’s turn, they can either place a bird, get eggs or get cards, and execute all the brown actions of their placed birds. The game ends when a player places their sixth bird, which goes very fast.

It really delivers on its promises, but somehow it didn’t entirely click for me (even though I was sure it was almost an auto-buy before trying it!). I think it felt too short – and it’s also doubling down on my least favorite tension element in Wingspan − namely the fact that you *have* to spend eggs, and it always feels like losing victory points 😛

Alhambra: The Card Game

We wanted to play Alhambra: The Card Game because we kind of like Alhambra − a pretty cool tile laying game (which somehow always feels more complex than it actually is) that relies on tile colors majorities and the fact that if you manage to not overpay for a tile, you get an extra action. We thought this was a re-implementation of it, but it’s the other way around: Alhambra came later, and this one is apparently now known as Alhambra: The Card Game, which Queen Games apparently decide to re-publish. It doesn’t have the tiles, but had the majorities and the extra action mechanic. The game is more abstract, and I do like the extra puzzle of Alhambra that come from the tile laying aspect, so that fell a bit flat.

Terravista

Terravista is a roll-and-write where the dice rolls indicate the colors of the two hexagons you can connect on your map at that round. The goal is to connect fruits to markets, and markets of the same color together; the first player managing to do enough of that wins the game. Pretty simple to explain and to play, but I loved seeing the initially very disconnected network come together to something that connected many elements of the map, and we picked a box.

Delfos

In Delfos, players get to re-organize a mess of tiles into districts that fits their own goals better. At a player’s turn, they pick a tile from the first grid (depending on the position of their pawns), and they place it in the reconstructed city next to it with their token on it. Points are calculated depending on the majority of a player’s token in the largest area of each color, on the number of tiles of their color a player owns, and on a secret-ish goal card. Really liked that one, although it can probably be played significantly more aggressively than we did, and we picked a box too.

Brick Like This!

Brick Like This! is a LEGO game. One player has a card (with varying difficulty) hidden from another player that builds according to the described spec; they get points if they manage to build the structure depicted on the card. It plays with more players, probably in a more competitive way too, but we haven’t had the occasion to test that. As it was, it was quite fun; additional challenges (“build under the table”) can add to the fun too 😛 We actually did look for a box, but Asmodée’s English/French shop didn’t have it and we didn’t feel like queuing for the German shop.

dnup

I had already played dnup on Board Game Arena, but Pierre hadn’t yet. It’s a pretty neat game where the goal is to get rid of all your cards by putting them into equal-valued sets. But if someone beats your set, they come back to your hand… on the other side, with different values. It’s smart, it’s fun, and we did find a box… in a vending machine. And the next day, they were actually distributing tiny versions of it at the exit of the fair, so we have two copies, including a tiny one 😀

Compress

In Compress, players try to remember an increasingly large sequence of zeroes and ones. To do that, they can use the cards in their hand to encode the sequence in any way they see fit, and feel ridiculous when they mess up the card counting or the direction in which the deck currently is. My brain hurt and I really like the idea and I have a deck in my backpack now.

Ra, The Dice Game

In Ra, The Dice Game, players take turns rolling 5 dice which give them different tracks to advance on with various scoring conditions. It’s well made, and it’s pretty quick − maybe too quick, the low number of actions felt almost frustrating. Apparently, it’s also a re-publishing of a 2009 game 🙂

Shape It

Shape It is a party game where people try to agree on a single word among 5 by moving abstract pieces into a shape. The number of moves is limited to one per player, and it works surprisingly well − I did laugh out loud many times. We’re not much of party game players, though, but if we were, I think we might have picked a box.

Cat Earth

The idea behind Cat Earth is simple: the Earth is flat, and cats really like pushing stuff out of flat surfaces. Players get cards with movements, that they can apply to the cat(s) on the board to knock out the houses of their opponents. While the concept is fun, it felt a bit long, and it felt like it lacked something to make it click. It also felt like it could be very easy to eliminate one player very early, which would make the rest of the game fairly unfun for them!

(Also: that’s the only picture that is really out of focus, and it has black cats. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.)

Star Gazers

In Star Gazers, players are trying to make the best mural out of pictures from the outer space. They get a square tile and a token at each turn, and should place them to optimize their number of points. I like that sort of game a lot; Pierre is less of a fan (too many conflicting dimensions to optimize at the same time); and thinking more about it, there’s not necessarily much of an itch that this game would scratch that Cascadia wouldn’t. Still, it was almost a buy 🙂

Enchanted Ivy

Enchanted Ivy is a solo game in which the player tries to satisfy the customers of their inn as much as possible (while maintaining a contiguous path of ivy). It looked very cute and I might eventually get it, but they didn’t have it in stock.

Calcool

Calcool is a tiny dice game with a lot of dice. Your mission is to have 10 dice of 10 colors at the bottom of your board, while never having the same number twice in a row, and while maximizing your points on each column. Way too short as a stand-alone, but there might be some potential as a mechanic of a larger game. Also, it’s harder than it looks 😛

Into The Machine

That’s a replay from last year – we had played a (pretty final) prototype of Into The Machine last year. I remembered it fondly, and indeed on the second play it didn’t disappoint: it’s a clever worker placement game with multiple types of workers, deciding a race between robots. It’s super well made, the graphic design is really good, and I look forward to playing with my own copy.

Journey Horizon

In Journey Horizon, players try to present their holiday pictures in the pretties possible way, where “prettiest” means “when adding a picture, score the newly added score with the cards you had laid down so far. Cute and interesting, but we weren’t really enthusiastic either.

Frosted Blooms

Frosted blooms is a polyomino game − at each turn, you get a polyomino from the board and you score it; when you reach certain area sizes before your opponents, you can get a scoring tile. The interesting point is that holes in your pattern give you opportunities to add farmers, barns and windmills, and those are a significant source of points too. Very nice, the hole mechanic made it a buy – and the tiles have a silver varnish on the borders of the flowers, very pretty 🙂

Fugu

In Fugu, players start with 18 cards face down, and try to make an increasing sequence of cards that matches certain constraints to eventually get points, by exchanging one of their face down cards with one of the three cards available in the middle of the table. It’s a nice short casual game, and we got a copy.

The Amazing Journey

In The Amazing Journey, players travel around the world in (hopefully) less than 80 days, and visit towns on the way. Traveling and visiting takes time, and not every traveling mode is available everywhere… and when it is, it’s not available every day, so you may have to change your plans or wait! This is a very nice game and I’d be happy to play it again, but we also know from experience that this is not the kind of game that we tend to get out from the shelf by ourselves − so it’s in the vaguely awkward position of “would gladly play again, would not buy for myself”.

Isle Tiles

Isle Tiles felt a bit weird, because we only started understanding its full depth towards the end of the game. Players get a few animal tokens; at their turn, they place a bi-hex tile on a board (they can play above existing tiles) and, if they have animals, they can add them to the tile in question. Animals stay on the tile as long as the player has the largest number of points in the corresponding connected area. The interesting thing is that, further along the game, areas tend to get disconnected but also reconnected, making the terrain quite dynamic. That one ended in the category “I really really want to play this one again and I would like a box please”.

Terraces of Kanoa

More hex tiles? More hex tiles. In Terraces of Kanoa, players place a three-hex tile in a common area, and get bi-hex tiles corresponding to the neighbors of one of their three-hex tile. They can then place them as they wish on their own board (and typically do that while the other players are playing), with the goal of creating isolated hexes, on which structures spawn. It’s a fascinating game – the whole “hex isolation” concept makes for very interesting puzzles,and overall… yeah, okay, we bought another game where we stack hex tiles.

Good Fortune

Good Fortune is a two-player game where players get domino tiles from a central area and collect them into sets to win points at the end of the game. To get tiles, the order of play is defined by either the smaller or larger tile they choose to play, they play it on one end of the three-domino central board (with a common half-tile) and get the domino on the opposite side. It’s kind of brain-breaking (I messed up badly twice, if not thrice!!), interesting and pretty – but they were sold out already.

Drops of Evil

In Drops of Evil, players are witches trying to brew the deadliest potion. For that, they use familiars to grab ingredients in the forest, and try to increase the deadliness of the individual ingredients that they put in their vials. It’s a neat worker placement game where players can play their (role-varying) tokens in the order they wish, but the resolution of these is fixed, and the placement of the workers can interact in pretty backstabby ways. I really liked it and we got a copy. Will play for Halloween, I suppose 😀

Minikin City

Minikin City feels like a simpler version of Faraway: at each round, players put a card on the table; that card defines their score for that round, the bonus they may get, as well as their order for the following round. Activating the end-of-game cards gives end-of-game points. It’s pleasant enough, but it really feels too close from Faraway (although without the mind-breaking “reverse the scoring order” mechanics, so if that one is a problem for you, maybe this one is better.)

Planet Bee

Planet Bee is a bee-themed tile-laying game: at each round, players get two tiles of different shapes, more or less expensive depending on the market, and place them on their board. Some tiles get converted as they get grouped to bees or various animals. Scoring depends on bees, animals, and end-of-game objective scoring. It’s a competent game – the rules are tight and the graphics are well-designed, and it goes in the same category of “games I’d be happy to replay but that I don’t feel the need to own”.

Fearsome Floors

Fearsome Floors is a new edition of a 2003 game. Players want to race from one end to the dungeon to another, while avoiding the monster that will try to catch them and eat them. It’s mechanically well-made, and there’s a lot of opportunities for chaos; I have a hard time with the theme and with literally throwing my friends to the monster to be able to escape on my own 😀 Still, I see the appeal in general.

Flixo

Flixo can probably be best described as “cooperative Skyjo” – players collaborate to minimize the amount of points that they have at the end of the game on all their tableaux, while getting rid of the “flixos”: cards with numbers… and faces. It felt like it suffered from a pretty big quarterbacking syndrome (it’s very easy for a single player to dictate other players’ moves), and the end of the game felt fairly mechanical (“pass around this card in as many rounds as necessary, done”). Not convincing, but maybe it can refresh Skyjo for Skyjo fans who want some variety. (Also, it’s quite obvious that we haven’t played Skyjo nearly enough to know how to play 😀 )