No question, 2000 was a pretty good year for gamers. There were a lot of good, new titles, even if none of them are close to being the next El Grande or Die Siedler. As every gamer knows, there are only 3 seasons in the year: Spring (Nürnburg), Summer (the US game cons), and Fall (Essen). And so without further ado ...
Morgenland/Aladdin's Dragons (Hans im Gluck, Richard Breese): This game is case study #1 in why even good designers require good developers. Keydom was a game released independantly by Richard Breese in 1998, and despite having appealing concepts and being generally interesting, it was saddled with some glaring problems - not the least of which was excessive length. Morgenland represents a significant rethinking of some of the elements of Keydom, and has resulted in a dramatically superior game, one which will appeal to much more than the niche audience Keydom appealed to. This is a very solid game which has earned repeated play well past the usual two-month grace period for new games.
ZERTZ (Schmidt Spiele, Kris Burm): This abstract game is simple, short, and surprisingly clever. It has a solid repeat draw, as it' got a lot of depth. Even if you're not in to abstracts at all, even if you didn't like GIPF, you should check this one out. Not quite as imaginative as TAMSK or as meaty as GIPF, but probably more accessible than either. Apparently Kris Burm and Schmidt have since parted ways, despite the apparent success of ZERTZ, so we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed for the 4th game in the series.
Taj Majal and Die Fursten von Florenze (Alea, Reiner Knizia, Wolgang Kramer & Richard Ulrich): The two Alea games, along with La Citta, are the big winners for the people who like somewhat more challenging euro-games. Taj Mahal is probably the moderately more appealing game, fundamentally a bluffing game with lots of chrome. The Princes of Florence is excellent too, though, and nicely themed. An English version is apparently due out soon from Rio Grande, and this should be a real boon to the American audience - this is a game with potentially broader appeal than most, but the language barrier is daunting to say the least.
La Citta (Kosmos): This is something pretty surprising for a German game, a fairly harshly competitive game. Players compete to build cities, and attractive cities will steal people from their neighbors. You have to carefully manage your expansion with your ability to support people (through farms) and keep them (through cultural attractions), or you can get into serious, serious trouble. Challenging game with an extremely high replay value.
Blitz und Donner/Hera & Zeus (Kosmos, Richard Borg): Very clever 2-player card game based loosely on Stratego. Players compete to drive their opponent out of the game or capture their "flag" by using numbered pieces (2-7) which are placed face-down on the board, with a number of special action cards. Stratego is a terrific classic, and this game does very well also; despite a rather hefty luck element, there is a wide scope for good (and bad) tactical play.
Carolus Magnus (Venice Connection, Leo Colovini): A very interesting new game from a new name. There are 6 different colors of Knights that you can commit to regions, although player control of each color can change over time. The regions are detached, puzzle-piece style, and when a player controls adjacent regions they combine to form larger, harder-to-take-over chunks. Simple, clever, solid repeat draw, this is a solid game. The only downside is the fact that this game is best only with exactly 3 players. The 2 player version is decent but pales in comparison to the competition in that genre; the 4 player, partnership version has some oddities (one team can fairly easily get 3-4 plays in a row, which can be unduly devestating).
Die Kaufleute von Amsterdam (Jumbo, Reiner Knizia): Fun game, sort of a combined auction/tile-laying game with a cool auction clock. Only problem is that it's nothing we haven't seen before in the auction/tile-laying genre, so it relies on the gimmick (the clock) for it's draw. That's OK, it's still a fun game which I do recommend, but it's not one that's going to get played a lot after the initial surge.
Silberzwerg (Queen): Another decent little game that seems to just be missing somthing. Each player has a bunch of dwarves that they are using to mine gems and fulfill contracts; you secretly allocate dwarves to different tasks behind a screen, and then resolve everything. A lot of good concepts, but in this case it seems that the players don't quite have enough flexibility to make a huge difference, and the game is a little long. Perhaps if you allowed players to automatically fulfill their own private contract during their turn without allocating a dwarf. Still, a solid, interesting game that's worth trying.
Battle Cry (Avalon Hill, Richard Borg): This is a wonderful, simple, Civil War "wargame" that is really a euro-game in wargame clothing. It's a game in the "roll lots of dice to hit" genre, but the units (nicely detailed miniatures) are activated for moving and combat through card play. It's exciting, fun to play, and involves some tactics. It is unfortunately marred by a few things: firstly, the "all-out-offensive" card which is rather obviously much too powerful; secondly, an extremely high luck factor; thirdly, a number of scenarios which are rather uninteresting; and lastly, the fact that despite all the customizability of the armies and terrain, all the scenarios feel more or less the same, leading to a game which doesn't have the variety it might first appear to. The game is still enough fun to play that these problems do not sabotage an otherwise good system (although perhaps the only reason the all-out offensive card doesn't is that every player I know removes it from the deck!). A recommended game, although at the price probably a try-before-you-buy.
Axis & Allies: Europe (Avalon Hill): Is it a wargame or a eurogame? I dunno, but given it's relative ease of play and the fact that it bears only a modest resemblance to the historical event, it ends up here. This much-improved remake of the Milton Bradley classic nontheless still has some issues. Primary among them is play balance (I've played 5 times and only once was the Axis even close) and the amphibious assault rules, which create very odd behaviour amongst the Allies (instead of the one cross-channel invasion, you tend to get frequent invasions so as to leverage the fleet's unrealistically heavy ground-support firepower), and the inability of Germany to rapidly move even small forces east to west (or even from Berlin east). Still, it's a game that is surprisingly fun to play, and I didn't care much for the original Axis & Allies. Manage your nation's war effort, fight land, air, and sea battles, and in general enjoy the grand sweep of WWII in an extremely manageable package. If some simple, reasonable fix can bring the play balance to somthing approaching parity, this would enter into the "Good" category ... but until then it remains a somewhat odd combination of being a little disappointing effort, and yet still enjoyable.
Ohne Furcht und Adel (Hans im Gluck, Bruno Faidutti): Not a bad game, with each player trying to build a city and each turn selecting secretly from a bunch of office cards (a la Verrater) each of which grants some special power. Interesting, but much too long, very little control, and no meaningful player interaction - not a good combination. Despite this, though, the game manages to be somewhat entertaining and is reasonable light fare. It does commits the cardinal sin of lying on the box, though: while theoretically playable with 7, it is so terrible at that number that it really shouldn't be. Cap the players at 5 and keep the game moving, and the game is at least workable.
Kardinal & König/Web of Power (Goldsieber): Not truly bad, but very light and without much to actually recommend it. It works as a game, is reasonably engaging, but is made entirely of recycled ideas, and is completely flavorless.
Der Weiße Lotus (TM Spiele): An interesting "Survivor"-style game, where players compete for areas by systematically voting competitors out using a stock of influence until only one remains. These influence battles are puntuated by revolutions, where players are forced to back either the Empire or the Rebels, and the winners can claim spoils of war from the loser. There are a variety of approaches to the game, as different regions (Temples, Forts, Palaces, Towns) all have different properties with respect to the rebellion and influence recovery rates. This is a game that is hard to call as a miss; it's easily better than the above two games, but has one crucial flaw: length. With enough players to make it interesting (5-6), Der Weiße Lotus just goes on for a bit too long (somthing over 2 hours) and is a bit too repetitive (since competition for each area is of the "last person standing" variety) to be comfortable. Trim 30 minutes off the playing time and this becomes one of the better games of the year - it's that close. As it is, though, it'll probably be consigned to my closet soon, the last step before eBay. Still, this is definately worth trying once (at least!), and may well appeal to negotiation game addicts - it's certainly an improvement over many classic games in the genre, and is not so totally free-form as to be frustrating (see Wongar). However, as exhibit #2 in why good designers need good developers, be sure to use the published rules rather than the designer rules that are floating around on the net.
Wongar (Goldsieber, Alan Moon & Richard Borg): Yet another compete-for-areas game, this one fails on a number of levels, most crucially, it simply fails to be interesting or to add anything to the genre. You play cards to add influence to various areas, and wertung cards in each area trigger scoring, with scores escalating throughout the game. Nothing we haven't seen before, and it lacks any kind of a hook or idea to make it at all interesting or engaging. It is, as our group discovered, a pure whining game. That is to say, most game decisions are made based on which opponent whines the most effectively (Vinci-style). I do tend to like negotiation games a lot, but there has to be somthing to actually negotiatie about. Sadly, one to avoid. As with several past games by this designer, there are several post-publication rules permutations, none of which do anything to help a fundamentally fairly dull system. If it weren't for the team of Kramer & Ulrich producing three first-rate games (El Grande, Die Fursten von Florenz, and Die Handler), I could safely say to avoid these collaborative projects which have some obvious pitfalls ... but there you go.
Golf Masters (Goldsiber): What were they thinking? I have no idea; I hope it involved people making impulse purchases of golf-related items, not of actually enjoying the game. I like physical games (Carabande, Elchfest, Bamboleo) as much as the next guy, but this one just didn't seem to have much point. Wind up the metal golfer figure, whack a small little cotton ball ... and ... uh ... see where it goes.
Der Wienhandler (Piatnik, Dominique Erhard): Wow, this one was bad too. Not a showy, this-is-totally-broken kind of bad, nor brain-pounding incredibly boring kind of bad, but somewhere in between. It's fairly boring and doesn't quite work. As is often the case with this kind of thing, the game was rather obviously crucially flawed after one playing, which left me amazed that anyone would consider publishing it ... but I guess publishing some losers like this is the price of progress. In this particular case, it just seems that there is no particularly interesting decision making, and that virtually anyone can prevent another player from winning fairly easily ... which is a problem.
Counter Magazine (Stuart Dagger, Alan How, Mike Clifford, et al): It hurts to say it, but the successor to Sumo - the brainchild of the remarkable Mike Siggins and long-time source of information for German games in the English-speaking world - has not lived up to it's predecessor's standards. Not by a long shot. Filled with dry and uninformative reviews, they have devolved to simply reprinting the sequence of play for many games, providing virutally no insight or analysis. Couple this with writing that is nowhere better than average, too much focus on a rather small, cliqueish demographic, and far too much ink spent on faux-intellectual topics of virtually no interest to anyone save the authors, and this magazine has fallen hard and fast in my opinion (and it was not that great to begin with). Games, Games, Games is better, although expensive for us Americans, and probably not worth the price. Which, with the loss of Sumo, leaves us with precious little on the print side. A sad state of affairs, to be sure, but with greater penetration from German games and more stuff on the web, we are in better shape than it might first appear (although web content has never been as good as Sumo). And in the eurogame genre anyway, I'd much rather play than chat. Anyway, I might remind people that while it's good to support the hobby, it's also good to support quality and supporting mediocirity will only get you more of the same in the future.
Summer is wargame season. In this case, summer goes from about April into August, with a few titles then dribbling out through December (as GMT screwed up their production schedule this year, and had many games delayed). The wargame crop this year seemed to mirror the Euro-games: a few very good, and a lot of solid games. To wit:
For the People (GMT, Mark Herman): Case study #3 in why even great designers need good developers; this is actually a remake of one of Avalon Hill's last titles, and should need no introduction to the fans of Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, one of the all-time great wargames and one with a great deal of crossover appeal to Euro-gamers in search of something meatier. Anyway, the original For the People (which had Mark Herman listed as both designer and developer) was a valiant try but horribly flawed in a number of crucial ways. Mark Simonitch has applied his talents as a developer to the new version, and the results show - this is now an excellent game, up there with last year's runaway hit, Paths of Glory (if not quite as good) - but at a compexity level rather beyond Hannibal. Despite a few remaining gripes (the most serious of which is an unnecessarily dense rulebook and a lack of critical player aides), this game now finally earnes the recommendation it deserves.
Sicily (The Gamers OCS #7, Dean Essig): This is my kind of wargame - an awesome system game. OCS is a remarkable system, of modest to high complexity but certainly not unreasonable, and gives a truly operational feel where most operational games are either tactical games on steroids or really strategic games. Anyway, this series stacks up next to the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War (AH/MMP) as tremendous games that I can pick up and get a meaty, challenging game that I can play at essentially no cost since I already know how to play. I find these days that this is essentially the only way to go anymore as my brain becomes saturated and as Eurogames provide such awesome gaming value. The Gamers have done a very good job cultivating a variety of settings for the OCS series, to the point that the same set of rules translated to a different map with different types of units and a small amount of chrome produces a dramatically different feel, from the grand, sweeping drama of Enemy at the Gates to the cat-and-mouse of DAK and the more intimate conflict in Bruma. Sicily is different still, an amphibious operation with the appeal of being able to control an entire self-contained theatre (no flanks secured against the board edge!). The terrain is varied, and the Allied army is better than it was in Tunisia and dramatically superior to the Italians, but still second to the Germans. Throw in some airborne operations and life is good - like all of the OCS games, this will keep you busy for quite some time even if you never play the Campaign game.
Cataphract (Great Battles of History #8 - GMT, Mark Herman & Richard Berg): After the mediocre (if somehow fun in a perverse kind of a way) War Galley, Cataphract is perhaps the perfect GBOH title - the rules are quite reasonable, the scenarios are short, the annoying chrome rules are elminiated with hatchet-like efficiency, and yet the period feel is retained nicely. Consider the Justinian campaign game as a free bonus (I recommend this approach) and you'll feel a lot better about the whole package. It still has the legendary scenario problems - the designers apparently don't care if scenarios in this series are balanced or even interesting - but this is perhaps not as severe as in previous installments. This is just right for a non-series game that doesn't have a huge replayability anyway (I hardly even consider GBOH a series as GMT and Herman/Berg seem to delight in changing enough rules between editions to make learning each installment maximally difficult, and steadfastly refuse to issue a series rulebook - which to my mind would be a lot more valuable than the Simple Great Battles of History that was just released).
Royal Tank Corps (Moments in History, Ted Racier): Don't be fooled - inside the ugliest box in the industry is the most horribly presented game in the industry, but it all masks a game of considerable quality. It will be instantly recognizable to Turning Point: Stalingrad and Breakout: Normandy fans, but the rules have been considerably streamlined and cut back to quite modest complexity (simpler even than Storm over Arnhem, I believe), and tailored to WWI. The situation is a good one, as fluid as WWI gets and with both sides given significant attack/defend/counterattack opportunities. It's a bit too long and has far too many production glitches, but is still well worth the effort. It's a terrible shame GMT or MMP didn't pick up this game. Mr. Racier, are you listening? Give this game to anyone but Critical Hit, cut down the playing time a bit, and it's a best-of-year type.
Pacific Victory (Columbia Games): After 1999's Victory, a solid and decent but not particiularly uninspiring game for the serious gamer, Columbia released Pacific Victory in 2000, which really is Victory as it should have been. Like all Columbia games, it's fairly straightforward, easy and fun to play, and of modest length. The full campaign game here is about 6 hours, which is just right for me for a serious game. The Front game's headquarters units have been simply and seamlessly integrated into the Victory framework, providing additional strategic options without constraining play as much as they do in EastFront. It's not winning any Simulation of the Year prizes, but it's better than Victory in the Pacific on that count, and like the Front games does get a surprisingly good historical feel despite a fairly high level of abstraction.
A Frozen Hell (The Gamers TCS #12, Al Wambold/Dean Essig): Now, I'll grant you I am less sold on TCS than OCS - TCS requires a leap of faith to play happily, as the system of actually drawing up orders for units in the form of Ops Sheets requires a fair amount of suspension of disbelif from all players, as rules simply can't cover the concept of the Ops Sheet's intent. Nontheless, for a package that has a complexity in the same ballpark as the original Squad Leader, you get a very good system that allows you to play a wide variety of battles; unlike Squad Leader, the battles are not abstract, you fight with real units with sensible TO&Es on real, historical terrain, and can play anything from small scenarios to very long games covering the entire battle. The system is definatley cleaner and easier to play than Squad Leader, and to my mind presents a more compelling simulation of WWII tactics at the battallion level (although coming from a SL/ASL background, with its exaggerated leadership effects, going to a tactical game without leader counters seems, well, odd). With that out of the way as an introduction to the system, A Frozen Hell is interesting from a historical standpoint - the Winter War of 39-40 is an interesting conflict not well covered in wargames - but perhaps less so from the gaming perspective. Like Squad Leader, I think TCS works best and is most interesting in combined-arms operations (infantry, tanks, artillery, other support), and A Frozen Hell is mostly an infantry slugfest. An interesting one, to be sure, but nontheless it doesn't rate as high as Raging Storm or Semper Fi! on my list of TCS titles.
Wizard Kings (Columbia Games): This was a hard one to put in the near-miss category. The game itself is actually awesome, but the problem - as with Victory before it - is in scenarios. The game desperately needs a wider variety of situations and setups to make it truly worthwhile. I have no doubt that this will eventually pan out, and when this happens, Wizard Kings may yet become one of the very best and most-played games of 2000. If your group enjoys making stuff up as you go along, this becomes highly recommended.
Ukraine 43 (GMT, Mark Simonitch): This is another game that was hard to label as a near miss. Designed by perhaps the individual I most respect in the wargaming world, Mark Simonitch, this game has a lot to recommend it. It's a a detailed treatment of an under-covered period in WWII, it gives a great portrayal of the Soviet mobile operations, and has a number of interesting new ideas. Most successful: the intensity dice. Most odds CRT-based wargames have the problem that a 3:1 will produce the same level of casualties whether it's 6:2 or 36:12; Ukraine 43 works around this by adding additional dice which produce additional step losses but don't otherwise affect the outcome. Least successful: ZOC bonds. Ugh. ZOCs are generally unintuitive enough (another reason I like OCS), with subtly differing ZOC effects in every game that uses them; ZOC bonds are even more rules-heavy and unintuitive. The effect is neat, but the concept is hard to manage for me. Anyway, this is an interesting game - but the problems here are the twin killers of high complexity and being standalone. I'd much rather have an OCS (Hube's Pocket starts after this game ends) or GMT's own East Front System game on the period since I would already know how to play those.
Simple Great Battles of History (GMT): For fans of ancients, GMT's Great Battles of History is about it. Until now, they have been saddled with excessive playing times (often exceeding the lengths of the battles they simulate), non-standard rulebooks, and the fact that somewhere between a quarter and half of the scenarios are virtually unplayable for various reasons (this rulebook does not change this last one, sadly). This has now theortically been solved by SGBOH, at the cost of ripping out most of the historical flavor and leadership effects that made the game appealing in the first place. Throw in the fact that most of the flagship titles in the series are long out of print, and SGBOH is not really a compelling offering. I was as excited as the next guy about this game, but perhaps in truth what I really wanted was simply a combined rulebook so I could easily learn to play and teach the games I already have.True, I'd like shorter playing times on some of the big scenarios so I can actually play them, but SGBOH has largely eviscerated a system that really just needed some streamlining. Despite all this, though, this is still probably a must-buy for owners of most of the GBOH line as it will open up the games for a bit more play, and itÕs cheap.
Risorgimento 1859 (GMT, Richard Berg): This is classic Richard Berg, which means you'll know if you're going to like it, and if you don't know, you probably won't. A choppy system with limited interesting application when there are so many more interesting battles and campaigns still to be covered (or covered sensibly, anyway). Another counter-pushers dream, this is unlikely to have a very broad appeal. In my opinion, this game is key evidence of GMT being in the process of biting off far more than they can chew, getting started on way too many different systems between this, David Fox's new Austerlitz (looks interesting, but is insanely immense), their excellent East Front System, Down in Flames, GBACW, the new card-based games, their American Revolution system, the Invasion: Sicily system ... they need to concentrate on a couple of these and really develop them. Series games are where it's at these days in the arena of seriously complex wargames, and it's getting to the point that I'm going to think long and hard before investing money, time, energy into a non-series game with more than 16 pages of rules. Risorgimento, even with its included strategic game (which is no great shakes either), does not offer particularly good reward for the energy expended, unless you are a Richard Berg fan or are perhaps Italian.
PanzerGernadier (Avalanche Press): Warmed over PanzerBlitz, and ugly at that. Nothing turns me off like a game that either fails to introduce any interesting new ideas, or at least combine old ones in interesting new ways. The tactical WWII wargames do have gaping holes - beyond Up Front, TCS, SL/ASL, and possibly Storm over Arnhem and Thunder at Cassino, there just isn't much of enduring quality despite a wide range of possible new approaches and scales - but that doesn't mean you should buy this game!
Lord of the Rings (Sophisticated Games, Kosmos, and others, Reiner Knizia): The only game of 2000 that immediately screamed classic, this is an amazing and highly recommended game. It isn't for everyone, as it's cooperative, and the game itself is probably not designed for tremendous replayability (although there have been noises about expansions and such, which would be very exciting) - but we're still talking about a game which hit 10 plays almost immediately and is still going strong. I have an extensive review here.
Galaxy (GMT Games, Reiner Knizia and Don Greenwood): A Titan: the Arena derivitive, this is a game with a solid fun factor. Lots of stuff going on, and with all kinds of special powers, you usually can hose somebody. Pretty low on control, but the solidity of the system and the entertainment value of the special powers has that covered. Unlike the rest of the games in the new GMT eurogame-style line, this one is very good value and highly recommended.
Starfarers 5-6 player Expansion (Kosmos, Klaus Teuber): OK, 6 players in Settler of any description has some issues with downtime and speed of play, but the Starfarers 5-6 expansion is as good as it could possibly be. There is one new alien race, with a good variety of special powers. They have kneaded the system slightly to accomodate the extra players - doing a much better job than they did with the various basic 5-6 player expansions. If you liked Starfarers (and it was one of my top picks for 1999) this is highly recommended.
Settlers Book (Kosmos, various): Settlers is probably the greatest game of the past 25 years, and this book provides a wide range of scenarios and variants - from the subtle to the truly wacky. Many are good, a few aren't, but all of them are good for at least one play, and between the 15 scenarios, 15+ variants, and 10 countersheets, you should really be able to get your money's worth. If like me you are a Settlers nut, or liked Settlers but became somewhat burned out along the way, pick this one up.
Cartegena (Venice Connection, Leo Colovini): From the designer of one of the spring's better games, Carolus Magnus, comes a surprise - a second design that doesn't disappoint. It's a simple, clever race game that is vaguely reminicient of Hare and Tortoise, but is in my mind superior by dint of not having to do complicated mathematics in your head all the time. Highly recommended, at least in the open play version where your hand is face-up on the table.
Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit (Avalon Hill, Craig van Ness): This is a roll lots of dice/shoot-em-up game in the style of Battle Cry!, Axis & Allies, and such. There is always some entertainment in rolling lots of dice, and SW:TQG adds to this with a clever card activation/planning element (you play cards to activate units a la Battle Cry, but you do it by forming an event queue of 4 cards at the beginning of the turn which are revealed and resolved in order). An extremely thematic game and lots of fun to play. I think the designer may have missed a trick with the card deck design; had I been doing it, I would have done it somewhat differently. The cards themselves also usually offer a choice - one group of one type or two of another. The problem is, that these decisions are totally obvious 99% of the time as it will be of the one group of poor units or one group of good units type. Also, the events are gamey rather than thematic (draw two cards & play one, discard to draw, etc.). Still, none of this detracts from a game that is excellent. I should mention that I quite enjoyed the movie; I have no idea how much a lack of enthusiasm for the movie will translate into a lack of enthusaism for the game.
Hare and Tortise (Abacus): Hase und Igel is a classic game from Ravensburger, and is highly recommended if you can find it. This reissue is a marginal dumbing-down (thus a near-miss) of the original, with a die roll and random event chart replacing the cards. Unfortunately, the new random event chart is skewed to help players who are behind, and makes your lettuce far too easy to get rid of. Better for kids, maybe - but even there I am leery of underestimating kids intelligence.
Battleline (GMT): Schotten Totten by any other name. While certainly far from bad, I don't know that there is a huge amount of replay value in the box, and that box is a bit pricey.
Keytown (R&D Games, Richard Breese): When thinking about this and Mr. Breese's previous game, Keydom, the phrase I think of to describe them is "all mechanism, no game". That's a little harsh, because both of these games do feature interesting stuff and novel systems. Keytown is a trashing game extrordinaire, as the only thing you can do help yourself is to hurt other people. Much like Keydom, there are a number of areas to which you can commit villiagers, and only the villagers with the lowest value at the end of the round will earn the area's rewards - in order to ensure your villagers have the lowest value, all you can do is add value to competitor's villagers. Losing villagers will get a nice payoff in resources, but unfortunately, this never seems to come close to being a fair trade. Anyway, an intersting game, and R&D's games continue to facinate but lack the pull to actually play.
Meuterer (Adlung): I'd much rather call this as "good", but the truth is that while the underlying game is solid, and good value per money, the huge sequence of play is unwieldy and the game is staggeringly unintuitive. I still recommend the game since it is fairly interesting and quite cheap, but it's not going to have a tremendously broad appeal, I think.
Cosmic Encounter (Avalon Hill): The game the Old Avalon Hill passed on for reasons of price, the New Avalon Hill publishes. While far from a bad game, I do admit that the ongoing popularity of this old and seemingly rather dated title is a bit of a surprise to me. It can be an enjoyable game, but it would seem to be simply superceded by recent games which are more entertaining, interactive, challenging, exciting - whatever you want, and they get it with less complexity. Perhaps it's the simple, undisguised inter-player conflict which the eurogames usually try to avoid. Regardless, this remains a light (and thus probably slightly too long), fairly simple, surprisingly well-designed game that is okay to play (occasionally), and I think the new Avalon Hill version is from a graphics standpoint alomst perfect - beautiful, functional, and thematic.
Carcasonne (Hans im Glück): This has proved to be the surprise hit of Nürnburg, although I must admit I don't see the appeal. Essentially a tremendously stripped-down El Cabellero: you draw a landscape tile each turn, play it into the "board", and can play a figure onto the tile if legal. Like El Cabellero, you then score points at the end of the game for controlling regions, although different regions (fields, cities, abbies) have different scoring mechanisms. Not bad, but the draw-a-tile play-a-tile format doesn't leave a lot of room for player control, there is no player interaction, and the game is neither exciting nor that challenging (or for me anyway, not really challenging in any interesting kind of a way). It is extremely simple, though, and can be taught in 5 minutes, and if you group it in the small-box card game category it's not too bad.
Attila (Hans im Glück, Carl Heinz Schmiel): A classic game of dual (indirect?) influence, tribes influence areas and you influence tribes. You score points periodically for the areas controlled by the tribes you have the most infuence in. Vaguely reminicient of Tigris & Euphrates, El Grande, or Carolus Magnus, but not in the same league as those games, not by far. More like Kardinal & Konig - short on control, and virtually themeless. I end up thinking "hey, I could be playing Tigris & Euphrates".
Doge (Goldsieber, Leo Colovini): The third game by Leo Colovini in under a year does not live up to the standards set by his earlier games (Carolus Magnus, Cartegena). Each player allocates his pool of influence each turn among 9 regions. The player who allocates the most and second-most influence to each region earns houses, which can be converted into palaces at a printed exchange rate, and the first player to get a suitably large number of palaces in a wide enough range of regions wins. Sound pretty straightforward? There is a little more going on with advisors and some limited ability to move houses around, but the game remains a design-by-the-numbers and fairly dull. Not bad for a play or two mind you, but lacks any repeat draw and certainly not worth the asking price.
Ivanhoe (GMT): I am left mystified as to what GMT was doing publishing this game to the cost of their bread-and-butter wargames (they may deny this, but it is inconceivable that Army Group North and Kessarine were not badly delayed due largely to this title and Battleline - much to the irritation of their P500 preorderers who paid for the former two games ages ago). All this for a game that is at best marginal, and salvaged into adequacy only be the graphics of Kurt Miller and Mark Simontich. This is also the only one of the three GMT euro-style titles that did not improve on the original in any way; the action cards that Ivanhoe adds to the original Attacke perhaps add a little flavor, but they are so powerful that they reduce the amount of player control dramatically (and the original was not exactly long on control to begin with).
Java (Ravensburger, Wolfgang Kramer & Michael Kiesling):
I'll admit, I didn't like Tikal much, and Torres struck me as being pretty
decent but rather limited and just not that interesting. So you are warned; but
I thought Java was dreadful, combining all the worst features of both of their
previous games. Excurciatingly slow, excessively computational, and just not
fun. If I want to play a game that involves this much brainpower, I'd much
rather play somthing from my wargame collection or one of the GIPF-series
abstracts - most of my wargames are more interactive, and in both cases
you only have to wait for one other player.
Best of the Year (Euro)
Lord of the Rings
Morgenland
Taj Mahal
La Citta
ZERTZ
Best of the Year (American)
For the People
Sicily
Pacific Victory
The Queen's Gambit
Honorable Mention
Galaxy
Blitz und Donner/Hera & Zeus
With that out of the way ...
Worst of the Year
Wongar - Goldsieber, Alan Moon & Richard Borg
Ivanhoe - GMT & Riener Knizia
Castle - Descartes & Bruno Faidutti
Counter Magazine - Stuart Dagger & Co.
All in all, a very good year of new games. While there were no new games in the
same league as recent hits like El Grande, Paths of Glory, and such (although
time may improve the view of the two most likely classics, Lord of the Rings
and Sicily), there was a tremendous variety of very solid games and a judicious
amount of new material for old games and systems. 2001 is shaping up to be
good, too: with MMP having games in both the Great Campaigns of the American
Civil War series (Grant Takes Command due in April) and a new installation in
the long out-of-circulation (but first-rate) Breakout:Normandy system
(Operation Market-Garden), plus the reissue of the all-time classic Up Front;
GMT's new Wilderness War (based on the We the People system) and Barbarossa:
Army Group North (East Front System); The Gamer's new OCS (Guderian's
Blitzkrieg) and TCS (Screaming Eagles); 2001 and should have an extremely rich
crop of excellent wargames. The Eurogame market has also show no signs of
slowing down from its breakneck clip, with Alea having some 4 new games at
Nürnburg, Hans im Glück finally showing up with a real new big-box game (by
Steffan Dorra, a name we haven't seen in a while but who has done quite a
number of fine games), and Mr Knizia presumably publishing some 20-30 games or
so, it should be a very good year.
© Chris Farrell
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