Nürnburg Games, part I
Australia, Amazonas, Ticket to Ride:
Europe
Kim and I had an opportunity to play through a
bunch of the new stuff from Nürnburg recently. Here is part
one.
Australia: This is a new
Kramer/Kiesling game from Ravensburger. You are competing to score areas on a
map of Australia. There are spaces along the area boundaries to place your
pieces (rangers) – most spaces adjoin multiple different areas. Each area
can score either for a koala bear (when all adjacent spaces are occupied by
rangers) or for power lines (when it has exactly some number of rangers in
adjacent spaces). Like Torres, the number of points you score is based on the
raw number of pieces you have, not on ranking or majorities. There is some
element of cash management here also, but really, that’s about it.
It’s
very
reminiscent of Samurai in feel, in that you want your opponents to set you up to
score, but without the elegance or depth of that classic (this is an
anti-recommendation – if you like Samurai, don’t bother with
Australia). Also, the theme is a classic disjointed paste-up job. Not terrible,
I would play again if others wanted to give it a shot, but definitely not a buy
for me.
Amazonas: This is a Stefan
Dorra game from Kosmos/Mayfair. It’s a railroad game re-themed to the
Amazon. You’re collecting rare and exotic animal species, killing them off
to send back to European collectors or researchers. Or something along those
lines, anyway. When you build a base camp location, you get a chit for the type
of species produced by that site. Each turn, cardplay will determine your basic
income, turn order, and which species you can get paid off for, which in turn
finances the building of more camps in connected areas. You get points for
breadth and depth of species collection at the end, as well as for connecting to
all four of the camps pre-specified on your hidden goal card at the beginning of
the game.
Stefan Dorra has a reputation
as a good, perhaps underrated, game designer – so after this game I looked
him up on BoardGameGeek to check out his ludography. It was basically as I
recalled – one minor hit, For Sale, and a handful of solid, workmanlike
designs: Marracash, Medina, Die Sieben Seigal, to pick a few. Nothing truly
spectacular, but some good stuff. In my opinion, Amazonas isn’t even up to
these standards; it commits the cardinal sin of being boring. There is little
player tension; everyone is just building his or her own little networks with
only occasional serious competition. The tactics of route-building and choices
in earning income are not without some interest, but for the most part things
are pretty tepid. On the plus side, the graphics are very nice, the theme is
reasonable, and the game is pretty
simple.
On balance, I think this is a
family game, and not a gamer’s game. I think if you treat this as an
“8 and up” game, it’s a nice partner to Sunken City –
the kids get some decisions they can handle, the parents aren’t bored out
of their minds, the event deck makes things pretty random, and it looks nice.
But I don’t think your average adult gaming group is going to get much
mileage out of this one.
Ticket to
Ride: Europe: This is Alan R. Moon’s sequel to his Spiel des Jahre winning
Ticket to Ride. There were complaints in the original about the dominance of
long-distance tickets and long routes; those who worried about such things
should be soothed somewhat. There are now tunnels, which can have variable extra
building costs, and ferries, which require wild cards to build. You can also
build stations, which allow you to “borrow” other players’
routes for the purposes of completing tickets. Finally, and in a major upgrade,
the engine and ticket cards are now full-sized and far
nicer.
On the one hand, I like the
appearance of better balance on the tickets. On the other hand, I have
reservations about basically all the other new stuff: the stations seem to
reduce the pressure to build because you are at far less risk of getting cut
off, and the randomness of the tunnel building seems a bit gratuitous and can
make the short tunnels very expensive. I fear that while the original Ticket to
Ride had the potential for some sharp play, the new version is more
“damped” and so less tense. I don't think the original Ticket to
Ride can really afford to lose too much in terms of excitement
level.
Given that a lot of the details
have changed, it'll take another couple plays to see if everything is in a good
spot, balance-wise. None of the new stuff is fundamentally game-altering, so the
feel is overall very similar to the original, and whether or not Ticket to Ride:
Europe will be worth buying will depend on how well the details come together:
whether there is still enough tension between building and drafting, whether the
various regions of the board are viable, etc. My initial reaction was that it
was nice, but it was not sufficiently different from or such an obvious upgrade
to the original that I felt compelled to buy it, despite the much-improved
components. But I enjoyed it enough to play again, and it might grow on
me.
Posted: Saturday - April 16, 2005 at 10:36 AM