Come down and learn a new boardgame or play an old favorite.  Downtown Missoula Montana.

The game is basically a race to finish as many wonders of the world as possible.  Everybody can work on any wonder, but not all of them will actually be finished.

The game is a bidding game.  Reiner Knizia’s name is on the box, so of course it is a bidding game!  Every turn you can bid an amount of cards to help work on the current wonder.  If the player who’s turn is chooses your help, you will get markers on the wonder.  If it finishes, you will be scoring some points.

Every turn you are given another card that you can use to bid with later on.

I liked the game, but I did quite terrible at it.  I’ll need to play the game again in the future and try a different strategy.

I would recommend playing the game with your friends, but let one of them buy it.

In the game, you basically run around a board and blast people.  The goal is to blast people until you have three frags under your belt.  Then you get a statboost and a new round starts.  If you can win the first couple of rounds, you can basically become an unstoppable juggernaut.  Or at least the number one target of everybody.

Had this game been around in the late 90′s It would have been great.  The game has kind of a Quake 2 feeling to it… well as close as a board game can get I suppose.  Instead the jokes and cards make you feel like you’ve gone back in time to where computer games were sketchy and connections were unreliable.  This is 2009 baby! Wake up!

I do have a couple gripes about the gameplay itself.  All of the movement is on squares and feels ‘chunky.’  There are not a lot of freedoms.  I wonder if a hex board would be better?  I have no idea!

Secondly is the lag… the time spent waiting between your turns is just staggering.  Especially considering a fps game is supposed to be cooking along.  It would be cool to have 2 turn tokens that get passed around.  When you get one, you can move and blast people.  Then pass the token.  Of course this would need some playtesting to see if it would even be feasible in the first place.

From some of the SJ games I’ve played, I wonder if ‘playtest’ is in their vocabulary.

Check out this article recently published in Wired magazine all about the game.  It kind of gets me inspired to get to work on creating my own board games again.  Since the WGM store closed down, I honestly haven’t been as excited about board games.  It is nice to be pumped up again.

Usually we play one or two games and there are a handful of folks who show up.  You are certainly welcome to stop by, introduce yourself, and join in a game.  We’ll always go over the rules of the games so don’t worry if something looks a little foreign.

I can’t wait to play another board game.

Roll a dice.  Move your thimble.  Go directly to jail.  Do not pass go.  Do not collect $200.  This is the image that most Americans conjure when the topic of boardgames is brought to the table.

Risk and Monopoly, are the staples of the American board game industry.  On top of having sold millions of copies, they have a number of other elements in common.

Both are dependent on dice.  One good roll can bring you great fortunes, while a bad one can cripple you for the rest of the game.  These games tend to have a large amount of chance or luck built in that seriously alters the flow of the game.  Coming back from these near death predicaments is not impossible, but struggling to survive up to your next turn is not the most enjoyable experience. Most board games in this category involve luck, conflict, and drama.

There is a school of boardgames that relies heavily on strategy without being a war-game like Risk or Axis and Allies.  They are more abstract than buying up random properties, and considerably less abstract then the movements in chess.  Simple economic themes tend to be somewhat more prevalent.  Also in this camp, it’s important to note that there are no player eliminations.

These games are still struggling to find a uniform name across the hobby.  Some call them German games because Germany produces the largest amount of boardgames per capita, the majority fitting this description.  Others call them Euro Games, because their popularity and production is not restricted to merely Germany.  Expanding further, some call them designer games and others strategy games.

I often refer to the games as Euro games, dispite the fact that a growing number are designed and produced outside of Europe.  Allan Moon is a popular designer here in the United States that has created quite a few popular games in this category.

Although it depends on who I am talking to.  If the person only knows of games like Scrabble and Monopoly, I’ll sometimes call them strategy games.  Although I always have to explain right after words that I’m not talking about pushing little tanks around a map, and I’m not talking about sending little dwarfs to fight dragons.

A lot of games are very different from the countless versions of Monopoly or Risk.  The games Ticket to Ride, The Settlers of Catan, Alhambra, Tikal, Zooloretto, Puerto Rico, and Agricola are all very different from one another.  They do however share a couple things in common aside from being great games.  They are all classified as Euro games, and they have all won ‘Spiel Des Jahres’

The ‘Spiel Des Jahres’ is an award given out every year to the top European style board game.  The award was created in 1978 to promote board game excellence.  It is basically the equivalent of an Oscar in it’s own right.

Winning the award traditionally means that the game is going to see a growth in sales up to 100 times what it would have originally seen.  Even being nominated for the award means growth of up to 20 what could have been expected.

Often times the award leans closer to lighter family games.  Every couple of years, the committee gives out special awards for bigger and more complex games.

This year’s special complex game of the year went to ‘Agricola.’  Which is Latin for farmer.  In the game you start out as a couple of poor farmers and strive to become a family of slightly less poor farmers.  Each turn you send out a family member to a different action such as plowing fields so you can grow more food, collecting timber so you can fence off pastures, or collecting stone so you can upgrade your house.  You have quite a few potential routes to victory, and it is often heavily influenced by the paths that others attempt to take.

A less complicated game is Alan Moon’s game ‘Ticket to Ride,’ the 2004 Spiel Des Jahres winner.  This game is much lighter and easier to learn.  The basic idea is that you are racing to complete your routes across the country by connecting cities by railway.  You get destination tickets that contain two cities and a point value.  If you can connect them you will get the points.  If not, they will be subtracted from your final score.

Ticket to Ride is what many consider to be a ‘gateway game.’  It is a great introduction to the hobby.  It is easy to learn, fun, and has a lot of replay value to it.  The typical game lasts one hour.  There are a couple of different versions available, and each one adds a little more functionality to the game play.

Ticket to Ride Europe adds train stations that allow you to use segments of other peoples tracks.  This makes it harder for you to get locked out of a specific city.  But you get points if you don’t use your train stations, so there is a trade off.  In Ticket to Ride Marklin, the German Edition, there is a new passenger element added to the game.  The sooner you run passengers through the different cities, the more points you can collect from them.  But you can only take them to the cities that you are connected to.  If you go to early, you won’t collect as many points, but if you run your passengers to late then another player might choose to collect before you do.

Although some of the fundamental mechanics are the same, within the different versions of Ticket to Ride there is a large variance in game play.

There are plenty of different types of mechanics that a designer game might include.  So going from one to the next can be a completely different experience.  This also means that there is sure to be at least one game out there that you love.  After playing a variety of them, you can determine which types of games might be more enjoyable for you.

So the next time you want to play a board game, remember that there are some places where innovation constitutes more than haphazardly slapping on a Starwars, Simpsons, or Spongebob theme on worn out 80 year old game.

There are games available that can be played in under 5 hours.  There are games that can be played without having to stab your friends in the back every time to win.  When you look at the games in your closet, think about adding a couple of Euros.

]]> http://spielknights.com/2008/12/games/an-introduction-to-eurogames/feed/ 1 http://spielknights.com/2008/12/games/thanks-santa/ http://spielknights.com/2008/12/games/thanks-santa/#comments Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:09:31 +0000 Toad http://www.spielknights.com/?p=18 This year I signed up for a secret Santa board game gift exchange over at Boardgamegeek.com and I’ve got to tell you, that I am now one happy camper!

My Santa sent me not one, but TWO boardgames from my wishlist. I received both Mexica and Mesopotamia. I had Mexica on my wish because it is part of the “Mask Trilogy” which also includes one of my favorite games, Tikal. Mesopotamia has some cool looking tiles and bits in it. I think that I also must have been listening to the They Might be Giants song while adding it, The Mesopotamians

Mexica of the Mask Trilogy

I can’t wait to give this one a go and see how it plays out. This game, Tikal, and Java all have a similar feeling to the gameplay… or so I’ve been led to believe! I’m hoping that it is as fun as Tikal, so I am excited to give it a couple of plays and find out. Next I’ll need to get my hands on Java and complete my collection.

Mexica plots the development of the city of the same name on an island in lake Texcoco. Players attempt to partition it into districts, place buildings and construct canals.

We're the Mesopotamians!

The tiles on this game look really interesting. The basic shape to them is a hexagon, but they lock together like puzzle pieces. The bits on the back of the box look very pretty as well, so I’ll be excited to crack this one open and start spielling!

At the center is the Ziggurat, where you must bring 4 sacrifice tokens to win. But to deliver them, you must have sufficient Mana reserved by praying in temples, which players build. You bring your sacrifices from 4 huts that you build, and you can breed at an empty hut to increase your people. To build huts, temples, and Mana, you use rocks and timber that you collect from quarries and forests.

I got my Santee DVONN and the Descent – Tomb of Ice expansion.  I hope he enjoys them as much as I will my new games. Thank you Santa, whoever you are!

World Games just closed up shop.  With that, the Spiel Knights had to find a new place to play board games in Missoula Montana.  Some of the coffee shops are good places and rather casual, but not always the best place to play games.  While it is great to stop by there and play once and a while, it just wouldn’t be a home location.

Our stint of homelessness did not last for very long as we were fortunate in that one of the members is friends with the owner of the local comic book joint.  Yesterday was our first game day at Muse comics.

It was quite the different atmosphere than we were used to.  Instead of having relaxing panflutes and sweet strumming from the ukulele we had anime, action, and violence on televisions around the store.  Instead of having a couple of people near us talking about how they’ve never seen some game before, we had people near us slaying monsters and taking necrotic damage.

I did find some relief when customers came through the store and I had absolutely NO responsibility to help them find something.  I do like helping people find new games, but it was nice to be able to just focus on playing.

Dominion was played, Infernal Contraption was played, and we finally got an opportunity to play Hamburgum.  One of the few games (if not the only one) to feature beer, but not have mass consumption as the goal.

It was great of the Muse to welcome our game group into their store, and it will be interesting to see where the group goes from here.

I need to get 250 items in the database to get to where we used to have it, 500 to feel good about myself, and 1000 before I should think about any advertising campaign.