Good grief! Five years since I last posted here! Still gaming, though, I am pleased to say. A couple of games of Carcassonne this month, although I lost both. I still prefer Hunters & Gatherers to the base game.

Essen 2007 - a personal retrospective

Well, I always intended to write a long and entertaining report of my first visit to Spiel in October 2007. Somehow, October drifted into November, November became December and now it’s 2008. In a way, this is great news, as I am now in the same year on the calendar as Spiel ‘08! But I regret that I didn’t sit down and write a report back in October.

It’s too late to do it justice now, so instead I thought I would try to record a “Top Ten” list of experiences that will convey something of the magic of the event for a newbie. So, in no particular order, here goes. I'm not going to say anything about the games themselves, as that's been done by others already, and there probably won't even be exactly ten items, but hopefully you'll get the idea ...

I flew from Birmingham (about two hours drive from where I live) to Düsseldorf, catching a 7.30am flight on the Thursday morning. As I finally worked out that I could get the required two days out of the office only about a fortnight before the convention started, I knew that flight tickets would not be cheap and Birmingham turned out to offer the best combination of good prices and a direct flight. I dropped my overnight bag off at the hotel I had chosen, quite close to Düsseldorf's main railway station, and jumped on a train to Essen. I got to the convention by about 11.00am, which was just fine. So my impression here is that Essen is pretty easy to get to. I like the idea of driving there one year, but the pleasure of driving in mainland Europe would be entirely offset by the hassle of driving across southern England (and back again afterwards).

I had reserved a copy of Key Harvest from Richard Breese before the event, in the hope that I would be able to get away. So one of my first stops in the convention was at the R&D stand. Richard very kindly signed a copy for me and I was able to watch him finishing off a game with a couple of visitors. He won! This may sound odd, but just seeing the designers of these games was awesome. I know they are just regular people too, but there was something quite fascinating about being able to meet people like Richard face to face.

Splotter had a stand at the show. No new games, but again, just to meet the designers of Roads & Boats and Antiquity was great. And to hear them switch pretty seamlessly between Dutch, German and English was very impressive too.

There was an area where chess was being promoted. In one corner was a table set up for Überblitz chess. I had never seen anything like this being played and it was utterly fascinating. Each player gets one minute to make all of his or her moves or else the game is lost. I am not a good chess player, but watching maybe half a dozen games in quick succession, you could see ebbs and flows across the board and each side almost took on an organic quality. Totally mesmerising. I was drawn back to this several times over the two days.

This isn't the first Essen 2007 list to include Brass, but I have to mention it because the Warfrog stand gave another opportunity to see a British designer in action. Martin Wallace in full flow explaing to a couple of tables at once how to play this game was a sight to behold. The game isn't the most straightforward, and I wasn't always entirely sure what Martin was talking about, but two tables of rapt Germans of varying ages hung on his every word and understood his every word - you could tell this because of the follow-up questions they asked.

And opposite the Warfrog stand were Valley Games. The reason this is on the list is because of the real buzz as the stacks of copies of Container arrived on Thursday afternoon. The hurried counting and double-counting by the guys on the stand of the number of copies that had been delivered, the realisation that the Essen special containers hadn't been delivered in the manner expected and the setting up of groups to count and bag the extras, all this gave a small insight into what it must be like to be a publisher at the show with a game that is just about to launch.

I really wanted to pick up a copy of Zooloretto while in Essen so as to avoid having to pay a sterling price here in the UK. Lots of copies on the various secondhand dealers' stands, but none of them were really sure whether English rules were included. So I passed. Then I was watching some peole playing it at the main Abacus stand and I realised that the seemed to have English rules in front of them. A quick question at the counter and I was told that the Abacus new edition did indeed include English rules. So I got a brand new copy for only 18 or 20 Euros, which I was very pleased about.

At one point I walked into Hall 6. The best way I can describe this experience is that I felt what I think Harry Potter must have felt like at the point when, intending to go shopping in Diagon Alley, he travelled by "flue powder" and ended up in a neighbouring street that was altogether less welcoming and bright, indeed quite sombre and almost menacing. It didn't really seem like Essen at all.

I didn't spend time playing games during this visit, as I really wanted to soak up the atmosphere and see as much as possible. I know that for many people getting to a table and playing and assessing a new game is really important, but I didn't play a single game durring the two days I spent there. This gave me time to look around properly. I spent a bit of time observing games being played at many stands and, mindful of the family back at home, this included the Selecta stand. I chose Giro Galoppo as an interesting little game to take home and it has proved to be a good selection. I was interested to see soon after that Rio Grande are picking it up for an English edition. My copy has English rules, but I guess these arrangements are as much about US distribution as they are about availability of English language rules.

I followed in the footsteps of many and picked up various freebies and low cost expansions and variants. Siedler von Hessen was one of them and if I'm honest, I'll probably never play it. But it's all part of the Essen experience.

I had wanted to get a copy of Piilars Of The Earth for some time. Particularly because Keythedral is a favourite. I had been looking for a copy of the paperback book in England for a few weeks before travelling, but since World Without End, the sequel, had just been published, every UK bookstore I visited seemed to be out of stock. On Friday morning, on my way to the convention, I stopped at Essen mainline station, walked up into a pedestrianised shopping area and found a large bookshop, intending to buy a guidebook to the area. It had an English language section. There was a copy of the book, which incredibly cost me less in Euros than it would have done in sterling in the UK. Fantastic! Then, later on in the morning, I found a stand with an English language copy of the game for about 20 Euros. I don't think this was the Mayfair stand, but it was certainly a stroke of luck.

As mentioned above, I didn't play games during the visit. This may seem like a wasted opportunity to many, and maybe it'll be different another year. However, during Thursday evening, Friday evening and Saturday morning (before my return flight), I took the opportunity to explore Düsseldorf. The city has a fascinating old town, some great river frontage and lots to see. Some great eating places in the old town and I sat out of doors to eat on both evenings. (What, in October? Yes!) Well worth a visit, and by all accounts a much more intersting city than Essen.

Oh and yes, I did buy a suitcase in Karstadt on the Friday night!

Ticket to Ride: Europe

We decided to break this out as a two-player game. We have played Ticket to Ride a lot and have generally found it slightly less fun as a two-player game than with four or five, so I was prepared for a "mediocre" first impression of this version.

There is certainly enough that is different from the base game to make this worth playing. When I was describing it to Lucy (who would have been happy sticking to the base game), I kept adding things (rather like Michael Palin describing the chief weapons of the Spanish Inquisition). "Oh, the cards are larger … and these are ferries … oh yes, and these are tunnels … oh, and there are stations, and they work like this. Oh, and you get one long route … ."

I drew Edinburgh to Athens and Lucy drew Copenhagen to Erzurum. I spent the first few moves fixated on the fact that there is only one route out of Edinburgh (bearing in mind that parallel routes are not used in the two or three player game). Then I decided that Lucy must be extremely unlikely to have any Edinburgh routes [are there any short routes that go to Edinburgh?] and that I needn’t panic unduly. Still, it was the first route that I claimed.
As far as the game itself, we encountered a bit of a bottleneck around Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest and each ended up playing one station. The ferries and tunnels seemed to add a little, but not much. I guess there might be more demand for locomotives in a game with more players, but there were often one or two sitting among the upturned cards without either of us getting very interested in them.

We both completed our long route and the two short routes that we had retained, and the scores were pretty close, around 35 points each. We were struck by the lack of opportunity to claim five or six carriage routes and by the relatively low scores at this point. We both finished these initial routes at around the same time and looked at each other, almost as if the game had ended. The only problem was that we each had around 20 carriages still to deploy. This is where our strategies differed completely. I started drawing new route cards, keeping the one card each time that overlapped most or was closest to my exisitng network, while Lucy started claiming the longest single stretches of track that she could find, regardless of where on the board they were located.

In the final scoring, Lucy was ahead by 99 to 86, and also succeeded in picking up the "longest route" card, albeit with a route of only about 23 carriages. [Oh, I’ve just realised in finishing this report that we forgot to award points for the unused stations. Still, as we each played a single station, this wouldn’t have affected the result.]

I’m looking forward to playing this again with four or five – I rather suspect that the demand for locomotive cards will be greater and it will also be interesting to see how stations are used.

Aqua Romana

We pulled this game out for a second playing last night. The first game had been fun, even though we had serious worries about the Queen Games ("QG") English rules as we went along, and we wanted to try it again before too much time passed. In the first game, we had tried to apply the "Zugzwang" rule in the way that it was written in the QG English rules, resulting in us both having to move each other's workmen at times. To add to this we had unfortunately also overlooked the use of the pool of spare Master Builders and this exacerbated the problem, because we could not summon these additional men to bale us out of trouble. Thirdly, the question of where bonus tiles (earned when the Master Builder rounds a corner) could be placed was a little unclear (the German "angrenzend" being clearer than the English).

I have been reflecting on the reasons for these problems. The first is undoubtedly the poor quality of the QG English translation. There is a second reason, and this is the layout of the QG rulebook. The gatefold format, with panels and paragraphs all over the place, looks very nice, but is actually quite hard to follow. I thought back to Alhambra, and there is the same process of turning the rulebook over, folding and unfolding, to find the right section. There's just not quite enough logical flow to the structure.

Anyway, I had spent some time reading the BGG game forum, absorbed the real intention behind Zugzwang and also looked at Steve Cox's excellent alternative translation. We were ready.

One thing that we did in the set-up that doesn't strictly follow the order of the rulebook is that we placed the reservoirs and selected colours *before* placing the Master Builders. This added a lot of interest to the process of selecting and placing Master Builders, which almost became a micro-game in itself. (Not unlike the field placements in Keythedral, which are equally important in their effect on the main game.)

The game itself felt quite close throughout, with all twelve workmen making reasonable progress. I felt that I was doing well by keeping some flexibility in possible placements as the game moved into the later stages, and Lucy found several of her aquaducts completing first, around the 6/7/8 mark. Unfortunately, I was unable to continue into the available spaces with the result that my final two workmen, each responsible for 8-point aquaducts, scored only two points and one point respectively. I had completely underestimated the importance of keeping an eye on the podiums (podia?) and being open to the possibility of a planned early exit. Lucy won by about 10 points.

Looking forward to the next game!

Ticket to Ride

We played a few games of Ticket to Ride during this week, as it was half term. We were in the Lake District, intending to get some big walks in, but a combination of low cloud and unwell children meant that the car space allocated to games was entirely justified.

I remember one particular game of Settlers of Catan that went like a dream from start to finish - every dice roll resulted in my fields producing, every trade was helpful and I reached the 10 VPs while every one else was in the 3 to 5 range. Well, one of these games of TtR went just like that. I retained two of my initial three routes - San Francisco/New York and Calgary/Salt Lake City - and started to collect cards. This was a five-player game. The eastern seaboard started to fill up quite fast, especially along the Toronto/Atlanta and Boston/Atlanta lines, but I held on in the hope that at least one or two of the routes into New York would remain open. Eventually, I started picking off some of the shorter routes, while holding on to cards which would buy the six-space routes in the north-west, relatively confident that no-one else was collecting these in more than twos or threes. Everything ran like a dream and I completed a single 45-train length route which zig-zagged all the way from San Francisco to New York. Very satisfying.

Tried a "beginner's" game of Sunda to Sahul. It's an odd game and quite difficult to play competitively. Particularly in a mixed adults/children group, there was a tendency to be co-operative and to try and help each other out. I know some players do this far more than I do - for example, I think my attitude to Carcassonne is more aggressive than many players like. I guess that the "advanced" options may be worth a look, but it kept seeming to me that this was little more than a giant jigsaw.

Scrabble

We have been playing a bit of Scrabble over Christmas. This is a game that is pretty timeless. When I was younger, I always used to look for good anagrams and try to form the longest possible words. Now I find myself studying the board and the position of the bonus tiles far more carefully, rather than working in isolation with the contents of my letter rack. This has meant that the two-player games we have played have resulted in very densely packed groups of letters, with few opportunities to expand, as we have both made plays that create blocks of letters rather than a traditional "crossword" style layout.

I have been keeping a summary of the final scores in our games (about 10 a year for the last 5 years) and will make a note of these when I have the list to hand. I remember reading an article in a Sunday supplement a few years ago about a couple who had just reached the aggregate of 1,000,000 points scored, playing something like twice a week for over 15 years. I know we won't get that far, but maybe we'll reach 100,000 as a career record!

Keythedral and Lost Cities

I have been meaning to write about Keythedral for some time. I bought a copy of the original limited edition last year and, having read the rules, was optimistic that this would provide, at the very least, a good two-player Settlers-type experience.

We played three games and I enjoyed them all immensely. Mary was less impressed. The set-up phase and siting of cottages seems absolutely key to the thing. It seems that, if this goes wrong, there is very little that the disadvantaged player can really do about it. Perhaps it's more acute in the two-player game than in a multi-player environment, I don't know.

We found that I was always able to generate at least one or two resources more than Mary, every turn. Mary was frustrated by the relatively limited range of actions she could take to thwart me. Once the three fences had been deployed (and I had dismantled two of them), there was little else to do. She decided to acquire law cards, and these slowed me a little, particularly where she was able to change the cost of seats, but even this was limited in effect. What she would have liked to have done was to relocate a cottage, or a field (!), but this is expensive and requires more fencing than is available.

I found the games very enjoyable, but accept that this was in part due to having plenty of resources. We'll try it again, possibly as a multi-player game.

Lost Cities. A very quick two-hander with Lucy, in which I was rather reckless. I played two blue handshakes on the basis of the 7 card in may hand and Lucy proceeded to lay out 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. The cards flowed beatifully for her throughout. She won by 77 points to -12 points. And that's in a single hand! Probably some kind of a record.