There, SPIEL Essen 2024 is behind us, and it was another great edition. It was slightly awkward when we saw “by the way, the 4-day tickets are sold out” before we got ours; thankfully we managed to get daily tickets before they ran out as well. This is the first year that they have contingents, and they hit them every day, so it was, well, a busy fair. Anyway, let’s go for the (by now) traditional back-from-Essen post! I counted 37 games in this post, so brace yourselves, it’s a long one 😉
Another year, another SPIEL, and it keeps delivering, as an event. A lot of games played, a lot of games bought, a lot of fun 🙂 And, if you’re wondering about the bottle of wine on the loot: we went to a restaurant (Fischerei) and got their fixed menu with wine pairing, and got treated with a bottle on our way out! (Food was delicious, by the way – highly recommended if you’re in the area. And like fish.)
So, let’s talk about games and, like last year, let’s do that in order of games played, because that’s actually easier to narrate. We’ve tried really hard this year to not buy games we weren’t sure about (“maybe is no”), but we may have failed a few times as the fair went on.
Papertown is a tile-laying game, where you try to make geometric combinations of tiles to place your buildings/objectives and the corresponding meeples. The twist is that the tiles are in isometric 3D, which makes it a bit harder to fit in one’s head! That twist might have been enough to make it a pick later during the Messe, but we still had enough self-control at that time to not get it.
In Balloon Pop, you get a row of colored cubes, representing balloons, that float on top of your board, and they pop (making points) when they reach a certain threshold. The cards are used to define both the priority order and what you’re allowed to do with the balloons (place them horizontally, vertically, discard some of them). Pretty clever, and that may be the one I’m regretting not getting right now.
“Menhirs dans le brouillard” was a buy, and it was honestly half because of the title (which means “Menhirs in the fog”, which we both found hilarious) and quarter because of the people explaining the game (who were super friendly and passionate). And the game is actually interesting, even if it’s not our typical fare! You have an hex grid of forest tiles, in which a few menhirs are hidden. There’s initially some fog covering them, and there’s a game of adding fog, removing fog and moving fog so that you are the one to uncover the last menhir (or you’re preventing your adversary to uncover the last menhir).
Robo factory is a deduction game where players try to match a secret combination of color elements to create a robot. It’s essentially a multi-player, simpler, version of MasterMind, with all the players playing at the same time, and we were not convinced.
The explanation for Mind Up! started with “Do you know 6 Nimmt?”. And it is indeed very reminiscent 😉 Players play a card from their hand, which allows them to pick another card, depending on the order of their card in the overall sequence, which they then organize in piles according to the color. It feels like a welcome update to the concept of “trying to get the right position in a sequence of cards”, and we got a copy (the first of multiple “X copies of N colored cards with numbers” games we got this year 😀 ).
Nautilus Island is a set collecting game: you’re on a desert island with a crashed submarine and you’re trying to collect stuff to survive. It’s a pretty neat combination of set collection, race for bonuses, and push your luck, and I’d be happy to re-play it, but it didn’t feel special enough to warrant a buy.
Line It is another “numbered cards with colors” game, where you build a line of value-increasing or value-decreasing cards in front of you, and try to time fetching “jackpots” that build up as a side effect. Considering our other buys, it’s possible that the only reason we didn’t get that one is because we had gotten Mind Up! half an hour before, despite the games not being that similar in the end.
Battle Fries is a very silly card game where you try to dip your fries in various sauces… and preferably other sauces than your opponents, by yelling the name of the sauce all at the same time. The theme is hilarious, but we’re not much for yelling games 😀
Black Friday is a market manipulation game: you’re trying to make the most money possible by timing your share buys and sells between the different market crashes. Interesting mechanics that do yield “large tendencies and small variations” around the share prices, but it felt a bit dry to be able to sell it on a game night.
Stamp Collection is a reimplementation/re-theming of an older game called California, where the players try to make pretty stamp collections to attract fans that bring chocolate when they visit/appreciate said collection. I kind of liked it, and the theme was cute, but the component quality felt pretty low compared to modern standards.
In Isle of Trains, you build a train to deliver goods and people to places. The twist is that the goods and people can be put there by your opponents, because you get bonuses and resources when you add things to your opponent’s train, but not to your own – making your train appealing is consequently a good idea! We both liked the game, which also had excellent iconography, but were a bit worried at having to check other player’s boards from across the table to be able to make decisions (checking what others players are doing are not necessarily our strong suit, and this requires a fairly detailed view of that).
Fit to Print is very reminiscent of Galaxy Trucker, but instead of creating a ship, you create a journal layout, with a bunch of constraints. Also, you score directly without making your journal layout explode first. I kind of like the frenzy of ship building in Galaxy Trucker, but I was never convinced by the “race” second half of the game, so Fit to Print plays into that. Add to that an adorable “forest newspaper” theme, and that’s a box that went home with us.
Footprints is probably the game I got most excited about while playing it. You’re playing as a clan of stone age people who move through the terrain, gathering resources and leaving footprints (and cave paintings) around. Each card you have can either move your pawn or increase the amount of movement you get in one or two terrain types, and you unlock more powers as you go. It was really enjoyable and we also got a box for home – good thing that we did, because it did sell out later during the Messe!
In Color Flush, players have colored cards that may or may not have the same color on both sides. They’re trying to get a hand in front of them that has only one color of cards, and they do that by picking cards, removing cards and turning cards. We explored this 3+-player game on our own with the German rule, and it felt like it could be fun, so we got a box; but a subsequent attempt at play proved disappointing. Possibly the buying mistake for this year :p
Sixto is a roll&write game where you decide, on each roll, whether you want to cross the cell corresponding to a number and a color on your sheet. Crossing a cell prevents you from crossing cells to the left of it; scores depend on the number of crossed cells on each row and each column (and can be negative if there’s only a single cell crossed on a given line!). Could probably replace Yahtzee for most use cases, but we don’t play Yahtzee much 😉
Whale Street is a stock exchange game where you try to invest your and your companies monies wisely (in order to maximize your final profit), while trying to be the “best operated company”. Honestly kind of neat, and clicked well together; playing it during the demo only the two of us may have removed a bit from the desired feeling of the game (as it was, we probably weren’t competitive enough with each other!), which may have been more fun otherwise.
Trio was a “colored number card game”, so obviously we had to give it a try 😉 Cards are split between players and a third deck that gets laid faced down on the table. Players are trying to create three triples of identical cards by asking their opponents for their lowest or highest card, playing their own lowest or highest card, or flipping a card from the middle. requires quite some memory, but we had more than a few good laughs, it’s quick to play and… well, fun – so that’s another deck of numbered colored cards in the collection 😉
Bites has an unfortunate title for French-speaking gamers, but a cute theme where ants are trying to gobble picnic leftovers. All players control all the ants, and can get a piece of food on each round; the order in which the ants arrive at the end of the path determine which food is worth how many points. Modifier cards for each game round up the box. It’s well-designed and a fun casual game; we played it in the evening at the hotel bar and not during the Messe itself, so we didn’t get a copy then 😉
On the Road lets players take the role of a group on their road to success, from their grandma’s farm to a large festival. They collect tickets that gives them fans which should eventually attend the festival… if you’re lucky, that is. Kind of nice, very cute components (the band vans are adorable), but it didn’t quite click enough for it to be a buy.
Garden Guests
Garden Guests is a distant cousin of Hex: players (or teams of players) want to connect one side of the hexagon to the other with their tokens. For that, they can build bases, and then build paths connecting these bases, depending on the cards they have in their hand. Lovely components, but too abstract for our usual fare. I’m a bit curious about the team play, though (players of different teams play alternatively, are not allowed to communicate but can pass cards between each other).
In Sunrise Lane, you build houses of different levels on marked spots to get points depending on the height of the buildings and the exact spot where you put them. You can continue building adjacently in a chain as long as you have the cards to do so. It felt more abstract that it looked, which is not a surprise as we learnt later that it was a reimplementation of Rondo, except on a square grid.
In After Us, players are trying to recruit a band of primates to be the first to evolve to intelligence. The primates cards typically give you some actions or half-actions that can be combined with other half-actions from other cards, allowing you to build resources to get more better faster stronger primates. I liked it a lot, so we got a copy; other players at the table bemoaned the lack of interaction, which is a fair question (but not one that particularly bothers us.)
In Apocalipsocks, you try to pair similar-looking socks into identical pairs of socks and, when you do that, your opponents get to do something silly like turning on themselves or playing with one eye closed. It probably works for its audience, but that’s not us 😉 The cards are neat and the details to take care of are fun!
Rome In A Day is pretty similar to The Great Split, which we liked a lot last year: you split tiles behind a screen in two groups, and your neighbor player decides which group of tiles they want to add to their board. Compared to The Great Split, though, it felt like there was a bit more strategy involved in choosing groupings, because the other player’s boards are much more visible/readable; the “getting points” part of it also requires a bit more thinking. Long story short, we got a copy of this one.
Belgian Beers Race Dice is a roll&write version of Belgian Beers Race. The theme is similar: trying to visit as many breweries as possible while filling in objectives, not get too drunk, and come back to Brussels early enough. The marking sheet makes it kind of hard to follow what’s happening, and it’s quite easy to forget to cross something, which is a bit sad, because the rest of the game feels like a decent roll&write.
Moon River is a clear riff on Kingdomino, but where players get to build their own dominoes. Also, there’s cows. Kingdomino still has my heart, but I liked this specific take (while I was not necessarily convinced by other variants of it), which felt different enough and enjoyable enough to get a box for that “I’d play Kingdomino, but I’d like something just a tiny bit more complex” mood 😀 (yes, it’s a pretty specific mood.)
Dorfromantik is a cooperative game, adapted from the video game of the same name. I love the video game, I was excited to see the board game adaptation, then a bit skeptical because it didn’t sound that fun, then it got the Spiel des Jahres award, then I watched it played and was still not convinced, and then I played it myself… and it was super fun. We got a copy, I’m not sure how/with whom we’re going to play the campaign (you get to “unlock” more tiles depending on your score :)) but… worst case I’ll play solo 😛 The above picture is a giant version of it – the box version has much smaller tiles! (Which is a good thing for my table estate.)
In Deep Dive, you have a colony of penguins looking for food. The deeper you go, the better the fish – but the higher the chance of getting trapped by a predator (No worries, though, you’ll get back eventually!). It’s a pretty fun push-your-luck game, it plays 6, we know who may appreciate that one, so that was a buy.
ArcheOlogic is a puzzle game that uses the same kind of mechanic as Turing Machine, but to make players guess the layout of an ancient temple. You get to ask questions such as “what are the parts of this piece that are on column C” or “how many empty spaces is there on line 2”, with various associated costs, and the “most efficient” player normally wins the game. It’s well-designed and actually far more accessible than it looks, but we feared not having the audience for it to be played multiple times.
In Mytikas, players try to build houses and temples on the Mount Olympus, while trying to gain the favors of the gods. It’s a resource-managing game, with light worker placement, and generally pleasant, but (for us) not enthusiastically so.
It had been three years: last time we were in Essen was in October 2019. 2020 was a fully virtual edition; 2021 still felt too unsafe to go. This year, it felt OK enough, especially since there was a full mask mandate on the fair – we’ll see in the next few days if indeed it was! But in the meantime, it was SO GOOD to be back in Essen for SPIEL. We played a lot, we were ALMOST reasonable on our loot, we’re exhausted – but super happy to have gone 🙂
Now we’re back home… time for a few quick notes of all the games we saw! In order of play, because that’s approximately as arbitrary as I could make it anyway. I’ve been too lazy to add publishers/authors – but I’ve provided BGG links on the titles where available. Also, credit where credit’s due: many of these pictures are my husband’s 🙂 I kept these notes very short because it’s already a very long post; but I’m happy to give more details if you have specific questions!
For the fifth year in a row, we went last week to Essen for the SPIEL board game fair. Four days of wandering in the halls, of playing a fair amount of games, of shopping… and a few very nice restaurants and cocktails in the evening, because why not 😉
This year felt somewhat less crowded than the previous years, to the point that I got slightly worried – but they did announce a 10% increase in visitors compared to last year (reaching 209K visitors); I guess the increase in surface compensated for that. But let’s talk games!
Myraclia, Rudy3 – a game where players draft cube ressources from a randomly-chosen pool, and use these cubes to terraform tiles that may give bonuses for the following turns. Very pretty and interesting mechanics; the game is on late pledge/pre-order on Kickstarter, and we ordered it.
Myraclia, Rudy3
Copenhagen, Queen Games – I liked the box art, and that’s probably the main reason why this game ended up on my list of “things I’d like to have a look at”. It’s a game where players gather cards to buy polyomino tiles to build a building facade and gather victory points as they go. It’s not a bad game, but it didn’t really click with any of us.
Imperial Settlers Roll&Write, Portal Games – a common dice roll is used as number of actions and resources to build a civilization over 10 rounds. I quite liked it, and I think I would like the solo/adventure mode, but as it is it’s a bit annoying to remember how many actions you did (and you can probably end up going to do 6 or 7 on one turn, depending on bonuses) and the resources you’ve used. Not convinced enough.
Periodic, Genius Games – I think we both really wanted to like that one, because how cool/nerdy is a game where you move around the periodic table? And where, when you ask if there’s a way to get more energy to move around the periodic table, the person at the demo explains to you that “well, no, because energy is never created or destroyed, duh”? And it is indeed pretty cool to zoom around the periodic table, but the mechanics themselves felt pretty flat. Let’s put it that way – as an educational game, it’s probably a good one; as a themed game, it was a bit disappointing.
Periodic, Genius Games
De Stijl, Quick Simple Fun Games – this one caught my eye because of its Mondrian aesthetics. Players add cards displaying 9 colored squares to the game, covering between 2 and 5 existing squares; at the end of the game, the score is computed both on the number of distinct areas and on the size of the largest area. Quite pretty, and probably takes a few games to master, but not necessarily our type of game.
De Stijl, Quick Simple Fun Games
Welcome to New Las Vegas, Blue Cocker – a roll&write without dice 🙂 Players need to build casinos on their sheet, and to achieve that there is three decks of cards that give a number (that yields constraints on its placement on the sheet) and actions (that allows to eventually win points). Actually quite fun, although we messed up a rule that made our scores explode compared to the typical score 😉 However, it’s not available yet! Buuut it’s a new take on another game, Welcome to Your Perfect Home, where players build houses instead of casinos – so we got that one instead. The “Las Vegas” version is slightly more complex, but Perfect Home has another interesting set of constraints and goals – where most of the player interaction happens, since there’s a race to reach these goals first.
Welcome to New Las Vegas, Blue Cocker
Empire of the North, Portal Games – a close cousin of Imperial Settlers, which I like a lot. Players also get to build their civilization and engine by adding cards to their board, and there’s a few additional mechanics, such as the possibility to go explore distant islands that yield extra bonuses. The food tokens still look like tomatoes (although they’re officially apples), and there’s also get fish as well in this version 😉 Pierre says it’s the game Imperial Settlers should have been; I might agree. We bought it as well as the Japanese Islands expansion.
Paranormal Detectives, Lucky Duck – we didn’t play that one, we only watched the explanation and the beginning of the game. Someone has been killed, and their ghost is haunting the detectives in charge of the case in order to make them understand what/where/how everything happened. And for that, they have a number of means at their disposal, that go from miming to a ouija board or even trying to assemble a hangman rope to give clues. That actually looked pretty fun, but probably not a good fit for us 🙂
Century: A New World, Plan B Games – the third game of the Century set of games, which can all be played individually or combined. The base mechanics is the same for all three: players can gather resources that they can upgrade via different actions. In the first game, the actions are given by cards that can be bought; in the second game, the actions involve moving on a map; in the third game, we get worker placement mechanics. We both like the first game and its simplicity – it has the same feeling as Splendor, and a bit more complexity, and the Golem edition is very pretty; New World is kind of nice, but not necessarily the one we’d buy in this collection.
Century: A New World, Plan B Games
Azul: Summer Pavilion, Next Move Games – we also didn’t play this one, only got a vague idea by watching people play for a few minutes. It’s the third Azul game, with the same mechanics of picking tiles as the first two (except now there’s also wildcard tiles). Here, the tiles are put on stars, where each branch of the star needs a different number of tiles. The mechanics of placement are slightly different from the other two Azul, but not necessarily enough of a different game to justify a buy, considering we already have (and enjoy) the Stained Glass version. It still looks very pretty, though.
Azul: Summer Pavilion, Next Move Games
Deep Blue, Days of Wonder – the Days of Wonder of the year. This time it’s a push-your-luck game, with a diving theme, where players try to get the largest amount of treasures (and hence monies, and hence points) without getting hit by the lack of oxygen or harpoons. They start with a hand of cards that allows different actions and, to help them, they can recruit more people (get more cards) that will get them bonuses or additional actions. I liked it way more than I thought I would (it’s fun!), the production quality is at the usual very high Days of Wonder standards, it plays up to 5, and we ended up grabbing a copy (finding a non-German copy in the Asmodee shops ended up being a fail; we ended up finding a French copy directly at Days of Wonder where they had a few French boxes behind the desk.)
Deep Blue, Days of Wonder
Amul, Lautapelit – we had played a prototype of that one last year under the name Silk Road, and it was a pleasure to see the final version and to play it again (with a group of people coming from Singapore!) At every turn, players get a new card, choose a card to put on the common market, pick a card from said common market, and play a card on their board, trying to gather sets and get actions that will eventually build points for the end of the game. The extra twist is that some cards only score when they are kept them in hand, and some cards only score when they are put on the table, yielding agonizing decision-making about what to do since it IS mandatory to put a card on the table 😀 Really liked it, and it plays up to 8 with mostly simultaneous playing; we grabbed a copy, and I’m looking forward to play it again.
Amul, Lautapelit
Minecraft: Builders and Biomes, Ravensburger – a board game adaptation of, well, Minecraft. Players can gather resources by mining them in a cube of resources, discover tiles, reconfigure their board, fight monsters, and score points doing all that. It is actually a very good adaptation of the video game, it’s not very deep but I could see that one working well in a family with kids – both simple enough and strategic enough for everyone to have fun. It’s a bit sad that the cardboard bits feel very flimsy (and that the scoring markers are larger than the scoring tracks! Infuriating 😉 ) Not a buy for us, but I’m keeping it in mind as a gift idea for that kind of situation 🙂
Minecraft: Builders and Biomes, Ravensburger
Glenmore Chronicles, Funtalis – a game full of Scotsmen and Scotland places and whisky, where players build their settlements by getting tiles on a track, producing resources, using resources, and trying to optimize the placement of their tiles to be able to activate them at all. One of the twists is that players get negative points at the end depending on the size of their settlements (the more tiles, the less points), so they need to get “as large as necessary, but not larger”. I lost that game SUPER BADLY, but I still enjoyed it a lot, and we came home with a box. On top of that, there’s 8 mini-expansions within the game, that all come with their little box that looks like a book, and that’s completely adorable (and no, I don’t have a picture, but believe me, it’s adorable.)
Project L, Boardcubator – players start with small polyomino pieces that they can upgrade, downgrade or change to other ones, and objective cards for which they need to gather a set of polyominos making the shape of the card (a bit like a tangram). They keep their polyominos and typically get new ones, which allows them to build more and more complex objective cards – and hopefully get more and more victory points. It’s quite pleasant and the material is really nice; I think it might have been a buy if it had been available on the booth (but it’s not out yet).
Project L, Boardcubator
Petrichor, Mighty Boards – a wonderful theme, since players get to play CLOUDS! They need to move around and strategize to rain at the right time on the right crops to get victory points. It’s quite brain-intensive because most of the actions have a delayed effect, but it looks really interesting, although I’ll definitely get an extra game or two to really get the feel for the game. We were on the fence for a while about getting it, but we ended up grabbing a copy at the end of the fair.
Petrichor, Mighty Boards
Dune, Gale Force Nine – yes, THAT Dune. I think this was the largest surprise for me this year. I tend to shy away from that kind of game that has diplomacy and alliances and mind games as a selling point. But we had a short talk with someone at the booth one of the evenings who was actually quite enthusiastic and selling it very well, so we ended up grabbing a demo game when we saw a table was getting free (while we were mulling over the Petrichor decision at the next booth). I was very, VERY lost at the beginning of the game because the explanations were somewhat confusing (to a very unpleasant point), but I finally got somewhat of a feel for the game and I ended up liking it a lot. The theme is strong, I played Harkonnen and I really enjoyed it, and it ended up being a game I reaaaally wanted to play again. They were out of stock on site, but they apparently had a bit of stock in an external warehouse; we ordered a copy, and it will hopefully arrive in our shelves soon.
Dune, Gale Force Nine
On the Underground: London/Berlin, LudiCreations – a transport network construction game where players try to have passengers move to their destinations in an optimal way. We only got the 3-minute explanation, no demo game, and I must admit I phased out for most of it (I probably got tired at that moment), so… I kind of don’t know 🙂
On the Underground: London/Berlin, LudiCreations
Tiny Towns, AEG – a game where players gather resource cubes (via a common card mechanism) to build buildings on their own board using geometric constraints. I liked it a lot – we got a copy, which also unlocked THE GIGANTIC AEG BAG (people who ever went to Essen know what I’m talking about 😉 ). I don’t THINK it had anything to do with the fact that I nuked the rest of the table, score-wise, but it sure didn’t harm 😉
Tiny Towns, AEG
Curios, AEG – we usually don’t spend that much time on the AEG booth, and it may be a good thing, since we ended up buying this year the two games we tested by them! Curios is a game where players are trying to get the most value from artifacts that they can gather; the twist is that they do not know the exact value of said artifacts, they only have a few clues. It ends up being fun on a game theory level, and generally speaking quite enjoyable, short, and playing up to 5. We got a copy.
Little Town, Iello – players build a common city by adding tiles to a board and activating tiles around their player marker to gather resources (allowing to add more tiles). There’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s even a pretty good game I think, but it just didn’t click for me. I might have enjoyed it more at another moment, or, or, or (we’ll never know!)
Little Town, Iello
Crusaders, TMG – I must admit the theme is not necessarily something that appeals to me, but I really liked that game. Players get to move, build or attack according to a wheel around which they move tokens to get actions that are more or less strong, and the building that they build make these actions stronger. The wheel mechanic is a mix between the one from Finca and the meeple handling of Five Tribes; the whole game does have a bit of a Terra Mystica feel, and we ended up getting a copy. And since they were out of the regular box, we got the Deluxe edition – which has metallic victory points and very cool minis 😉 (And a metal sword as a first player token!)
Wingspan, Stonemaier Games – I had been looking for an English demo of Wingspan to no avail on the fair – but thankfully a friend with whom we had shared a few cocktails in the evening found an English copy and we got to play it at the hotel bar in front of a couple of drinks 🙂 It’s a bird collection and engine building game, it’s gorgeous (THE EGGS!), it’s the Kennerspiel des Jahres for this year, and it’s absolutely deserved. We found another English copy by chance at one of the store booths, and we didn’t hesitate much before buying it.
Wingspan, Stonemaier Games
Ganymede, Sorry We Are French – a racing game where players want to get their meeples from Earth to Mars to Ganymede, so that they can fly to galaxies far far away on their rocket ships. Quite pleasant, cool mechanics, but it apparently didn’t click enough to be a buy.
Ganymede, Sorry We Are French
Bruxelles 1897, Geek Attitude Games – I was intrigued by the Art Nouveau art, so I was happy when we found a table. Players get cards on a grid that give them different advantages; the twist is that the scoring also depends on the placement on said grid, and more specifically on the majority of money spent by players in each scoring track (column of cards). I’m not sure why I didn’t like it more, because it had potential to tick a lot of boxes, and it’s objectively well made, but it really didn’t click for me.
Bruxelles 1897, Geek Attitude Games
Just One, Repos Production – the Spiel des Jahres for this year. As far as we could tell, there was only one English table (and a lot of German ones) – and, definitely, for a word game, English is better for us 🙂 It’s a light cooperative party game, somewhat akin to Concept (by the same publisher) – one player try to find words that the other players are trying to make them guess. All players get to write a clue, but if a clue is given by more than one player, it gets eliminated before the guesser has a chance to look at it! So clues need to be helpful but not obvious, and it’s generally speaking a lot of fun (and sometimes downright impressive). We got a box, because why not – it can be a nice change from Codenames 😉
Paris: New Eden, Matagot – in a post-apocalyptic Paris, players try to re-build settlements by finding a good mix of people to populate them. To do that, they get to choose actions associated to dice that help get said people – so they need to optimize the choice and order of the actions to get what they want. I liked it quite a lot, but Pierre wasn’t convinced, so we didn’t get a copy.
Paris: New Eden, Matagot
And for the other buys…
A copy of Prêt-à -Porter, at Portal Games – I had bought the Kickstarter on “theme + strong euro + Portal Games” and I got my copy delivered in Essen
Railroad Evolution, the expansion for Railroad Revolution, a game that we quite like – it seems to add a few mechanics, to “fix” what’s generally considered an overpowered track, and to be playable without much hassle on top of the original game.
Play Smart, a small book by Ignacy Trzewiczek (of Portal Games) about role-playing – I had enjoyed his previous two books, they’re funny (the guy knows how to tell an entertaining story – we went to see his seminar during the fair and it was both hilarious and touching) and that’s probably worth the read
Railroad Rivals – it was an Almost Buy last year, and it was on sale this year, so I didn’t resist 🙂
A couple of SPIEL t-shirts, because they had a design contest (based on their logo) and the result is actually quite nice 🙂
One of the video games I’ve played the most in the past year or so is Slay the Spire. Since it’s getting out of early access next week (and getting more expensive 😉 ), I thought it’d be a good moment to write a few words about it.
Slay the Spire is described as “card game meets roguelike“. The exact qualification of “roguelike” is debatable, but oh well 😉 It works as follows: you start with a character with a basic deck of cards. You enter a randomly generated dungeon – with a few constraints in the rooms you can actually encounter. For each room, you either have a fight, a merchant, a resting place, a treasure, or a random encounter that may or may not be to your benefit.
The fights are turn-based combats in which you play cards – either offensive or defensive. To play cards, you need to play their mana cost – you get, by default, 3 mana per turn (and the cards have integer costs 😉 ). At each round, you get at least an idea of what your enemy is going to inflict on you – including an exact number and strength of attacks – which allows you to make decisions on which compromise to make on that turn. Moreover, the enemies themselves are mostly deterministic: with a bit of play, you start knowing what’s in front of you and how you can beat them. The fight is over when either you or your opponent is defeated. If you are defeated, it’s game over: you’ll have to start a new dungeon run. When you win a fight, you get to add a new card (typically chosen between three) to add to your deck. When you win an elite fight, you also get to add a relic, which gives effects that stays between fights.
The game is split into three “acts”, all ending with an act boss, and the acts are getting tougher and tougher – but since you keep improving your deck and getting relics, it’s supposed to balance – if you play well, that is 😉
When you first start playing the game, you’ll need to unlock most of the features: cards, relics, characters. I don’t know if I’m too fond of the approach: on the one hand, it allows to get to know the possible cards and relics with a bit of time, which may help with the learning curve, and unlocking new content is fun; on the other hand, I remember being a bit frustrated by the speed of the unlocking.
The amount of content is pretty impressive. For the normal mode, there are three characters, each with their own cards and abilities. For each of these characters, you can unlock up to 20 “ascension modes”, which make the game harder and harder. And since the game is randomized, every game is a new challenge. (And yes, there’s a way to save a seed and to re-try a run.)
There are also two “special” modes: a “daily climb”, to which modifiers are applied and all the players can compete for the highest score, and a “custom” mode, where you can create your own set of modifiers to have fun with the engine. And I was just made aware of the amount of mods that this games has – including new playable characters – I think I’m doomed.
The annoying thing is that I’m still a fairly bad player. I played, according to the statistics, 200 hours; that gave me 36 victories and 204 deaths 😛 And I’m nowhere near running in the later ascension levels (I think I reached ascension 3 on one of the characters?). It’s a challenging game – and it’s, for me, really not easy to consistently create a reasonable deck, considering the randomness of the cards that can appear. The good thing is that a run is between 40 minutes and an hour, which is a fairly low time commitment (and, more importantly: a bounded one), especially since it can be split easily between rooms.
Overall, it’s a very solid game, and one that I continue playing. The community has some very nice things going on, there’s a lot of fan artwork, a statistics database, speed runs – you name it. The development has been very active during the whole “early access” duration, typically with an update a week, a lot of tweaking, re-balancing, and patch notes to which I looked forward every week. And any game that gives me 200+h of game play is definitely worth the money 🙂 Oh, and it runs on Linux 😀
We went, for the fourth time, to Essen in Germany for the SPIEL fair (and that was the 36th SPIEL fair, if I’m not mistaken). SPIEL (or, as we tend to call it, Essen, although Essen conference center hosts a lot more things than that… I hear they have a car fair as well :P) is THE fair for all board game players in Europe – 4 full days and, this year, 190 000 visitors – that’s quite a few people.
Balise's Blog 