Spiel spiel 2015

Notes from Spiel in no particular order:

Celestia was the heartthrob of the convention this year. An update of an older game - Cloud 9 - this week saw Celestia's first print run which sold out on day 2 despite massive stock.

Celestia is a push your luck and bluffing game where players take turns captaining a ship from dangerous island to dangerous island in search of treasure. Traveling between islands requires whoever the current captain is to discard the exact cards from their hand to defeat whatever the deck throws at you, and their failure means that everyone in the boat sinks along with them and loosing loot. However, before each voyage players can choose not to throw their lot in with the current captain, falling behind if he succeeds but safe from danger if he fails.

Mysterium seems to have been a big hit. The last few days of the conference saw an ever growing line form in front of their massive demoing booth, and every available copy sold out. Which is a bit odd because it's been in print for European languages for some time now.
Get ready for Christmas orders: Star Wars Qwirkle is going to be a thing, apparently. No significant rules changes, just Luke's lovely face on some tiles.
Lost Legacy (the next tier Love Letter-like from the same designer) is chugging right along. There are now 6 separate stand-alone-or-mash-together expansions, which can now be found shipping in 2-in-1 boxes.

Got a chance to sit down with One Night Revolution. It makes a noble attempt to merge the branching logic chains and rhetoric of The Resistance with the silly fast fun of One Night Werewolf. Unfortunately it also manages to merge the weaknesses of both games. Set up requires a lot of mechanical explanation for such a light game, and the number of special roles and conditional situations can be daunting. Games are short and can either foster an exciting and puzzling debate, or can snap shut in minutes because after everyone's said their piece it becomes obvious what happened and who's lying. I really want to like this one because I love the games its trying to stitch together... but even I must admit it misses the mark.
One Night Vampire had a demo booth as well this year, and looks like it's shaping up to be a dollop more of One Night Werewolf. Not significantly more or less confusing or fun. It's different in how the characters interact and are balanced, but every role from Werewolf has an analogue here. More roles means more possibilities for fans who find Werewolf growing stale, but I don't see the need to own both.

Coup Rebellion is interesting. It's the same fast and frantic game of Coup, but bigger. The designers have taken a page out of the Ultimate Werewolf school of design by adding in 25+ new character roles which you can swap in and out of the game deck to create endless custom scenarios. However, in order to make the new card interactions function a lot more nuance and detail has been added to reinforce the rules on subjects like who can call bullshit on who and when. This causes the game to take longer to teach, and can lead to a lot more clunky edge-case confusion. Ultimately, it's still a chaotic 10 minute game where it's equally likely for one player to get rich and dominate, or be immediately sidelined. Rebellion updates a casual game feel and handle like one that requires a lot more thought, without actually modifying the chassis or engine. Bigger, bulkier, clunkier, but still shallow. All the same, if you love coup and wanted a bigger box with more ways to mix up the action, this is it.

Oklahoma Boomers was an excellent independent game at the show. Played a bit like a hybrid of Hey That's My Fish and Go. The board is laid out in a grid, and each player controls three meeples that can move as far as they like in a single direction along the squares, like a Rook in chess. After moving one a meeple, a player may choose an opponent's meeple and build two fences at the corners of of an imaginary square formed of the two. It sounds a bit confusing in text, but is immediately apparent in practice. The goal is to wall all of your opponent's pieces off from the rest of the board through clever positioning, and doing so requires a very different pattern of strategy than any other game I've played. In my first couple of rounds, I could feel my mind shifting and folding the same way it did the first time I played Ricochet Robots. While I was at the table playing with him, Martyn (the designer) got a call from Rio Grande requesting a time to meet up and talk publishing. He was ecstatic. Watch for this one.
Got a chance to grab dinner with Phil Eklund, designer of High Frontier and Pax Porfiriana. He's got a new release co-designed by Cole Wehrle coming out called Pax Pamir, and it's interesting. Like his other games it has quite a bit of upfront explanation and initially unintuitive rules, but eventually you have an "aha!' moment and everything clicks into place. At the heart of the game is a super innovative mechanic governing faction allegiance and win conditions, and the game absolutely oozes historical narrative. I'll be picking it up when it becomes available.
Plaid hat games has got their own LCG out now called Ashes. Beautiful art, simple card design, dice based mana system. Not sure if it'll take off given the competition, but it certainly has a nice aesthetic.

Tail Feathers is Plaid hat's follow up to Mice and Mystics. Beautiful and murderous miniature arial cute critter combat. Some mice fly atop birds, while others sail upon spinning leaves to attack the enemy nest. Leaf movement consists of sticking a stick shaped wand into a hole at the edge of the leaf and spinning it 180 degrees around the stick. Very cool and eye catching.
Pandemic Legacy looks dramatic. As you play each game the board state will morph as a series of random incidents confront the players. Sometimes you'll loose the trust of a city as the populace flies into panic, or a particular strain will become more resistant between games. The volunteers at the booth wouldn't give me too many particulars, but it sounds like they'll be releasing "legacy" content in seasons, meaning that after you've applied all the long term changes included in the box, you'll be able to continue the evolution of your board when season two becomes available.

Leaders looks interesting. A bit like risk meets the phone app from XCOM. Players take turns fidgeting with the app, buying new units, entering attack orders, and leaving secret messages for other players. Cool in theory, but in practice it means that while one player is hogging the tablet and being devious, everyone else has to patiently wait for their turn while unable to communicate openly with each other.

CS (or Detectives in english) is a deduction game that plays a bit like Concept meets Werewolf. All the players at the table are detectives investigating a grisly murder, but secretly one of them is the culprit. Every player is dealt publicly visible clue cards that sit in front of them such as a baseball bat, a syringe, etc. At night everyone closes their eyes, and the murderer selects two clues from the cards in front of them to be his murder weapons and shows them to the Moderator. Everyone then wakes up and the Mod kicks the game off by selecting a generic hint from a card full of random phrases. For example: if the murderer selected a baseball bat and running shoes the Mod might pick "Park" from a list of the Victim's favorite places. Players then have the opportunity to start combing through each other's evidence cards and accusing one another of being the murderer. Each player can only make a single accusation, and the Mod can only place 6 hints over the course of the game. If no one correctly accuses the murderer and states which two evidence cards they used, the murderer wins!

It didn't take long to teach to a young family, and it was pretty fun. The biggest point in CS' favor is that as I wandered around Spiel, I kept overhearing people talking about it even though the tiny booth was almost totally hidden.

Faith RPG is a new system with very loud advocates hanging around the booth and a great aesthetic. A bit bland and a bit scripted in play though. They appear to use a nicely illustrated 52 card deck in place of die rolling, a sleek cardboard character sheet instead of pen and paper, and equipment and action cards for combat so that creativity will never be necessary.

Beast Master's Tale is a beautiful game on its first print run straight out of Japan. It houses a variety of neat combat mechanics that are fairly easy to learn, and a tricky cooperative experience that wraps up in around 30 minutes. There are still a few issues that will be fixed in their next print cycle, and they don't have distribution yet, but it's something to keep an eye on.

Time Stories looks cool. It shares a lot of thematic ideas with Tragedy Looper, which I maintain is excellent and creative. I wasn't able to get a taste though, as their booth at the Con was booked two weeks out for demos and swarming with cameras. If nothing else, Space Cowboys really know their way around marketing.

A Study in Emerald is getting a new streamlined release. The original Study in Emerald is a collector's novelty Lovecraft themed deck builder with some overwrought mechanics, but an amazing endgame. Out of any game I know, this is probably the one that would absolutely benefit the most from a little streamlining and a re-release. Unfortunately, what I saw at the here looks like a nasty chop up of the original content. The board is visually unappealing, the semi-cooperative endgame has been neutered into a traditional victory point race, and the deck building isn't engaging. This second edition isn't actively bad, it's just bland.

Code of 9 is a new game out by the same designer as Tragedy Looper, which caught my eye. It's an interesting idea but hard to recommend. Each round sees players taking turns to place workers into a finite number of spots on the board to accumulate different currencies. The trick is that at the beginning of the game each player is dealt two private cards that affect how end game victory points are tallied, such as "Players loose one victory point per gold they have." Since each player only has a small slice of information about what they need to do or avoid to win, everyone must watch each other closely to discern what other rules might be in effect based on other player behavior. This is cool in theory, but the game commits a sin of game design by having secret rule cards that read "player with the most x cannot win the game." and variants thereupon, which is just unfair in a game where that might never be revealed until the end.

Krosmaster Arena is a cute little miniatures combat game. The gameplay isn't complex, but the pre-painted figures are have a lot of detailed energy to them.
I was talking to a few of the designers at the show, and apparently the usual Rio Grande/Z-Man/Asmodee publishing scouts didn't show up this year. CoolStuffInc.com however was being very aggressive in finding new games and making offers to publish and distribute in the States.

Other misc. photos from Spiel: