Dragonriders, SoDuku: The Boardgame, Fettnapf
A clever race game, Knizia tackles the latest
puzzle phenomenon, and a nice light card game.
Dragonriders:
Dragonriders is a unique race game from
Amigo/Rio Grande and Jean du Poel (Carabande/PitchCar) and Klaus-Jürgen
Wrede (Carcassonne). It’s a miniatures game masquerading as a board
game.
The idea is that you have a
dragon you are racing around a track. The dragon has a hexagonal base. Each
turn, you dial a speed from 1-8. When it’s your turn to move, you reveal
your speed and grab a movement measuring stick that matches the distance
you’ve dialed and – and this is the clever bit – has notches
cut in the ends that allow you to rotate your dragon both before and after your
move. So the 1-length stick allows you to turn a great deal, and the 8-length
stick not so much. This is fairly nifty, and makes for an interesting but
extremely clean-playing race game.
The
other thing I liked is that the courses seem very interesting – a nice
combination of snakey bits requiring precise maneuvers with some open areas.
There is a good sense of risk – how fast are you willing to try to go in
taking that corner? In a game like Formula De, you can see pretty clearly what
the odds are of taking the turn vs. hitting the wall at various speeds, while
here you really have to eyeball it and guess, which I find a more entertaining
game.
There are also some take-that
cards (magic fireballs, magic lassoes, and magic tire spikes) which add a bit of
chaos; nobody is going to mistake Dragonriders for Puerto Rico. In my game some
of the players got a little excitable about making sure nobody nudged the other
Dragons while moving your own (things can get a little tight), but this just
isn’t that sort of game; if you knock things around a bit, who cares? Does
everyone get all the cars back in
exactly
the position from which they started after a
wipeout in Carabande?
I must say, I
enjoyed Dragonriders, even though it wasn’t even on my radar screen as
something I might be interested in prior to Essen (I’m not a big race game
fan in general). It reminded me of Wings of War, another miniatures to boardgame
port I liked. It’s light, but I found it short and fun. It’s not a
serious game, but it captures the theme well and feels like a racing game
(something that most racing games surprisingly fail to accomplish for me). What
remains to be determined is if it can be had for a reasonable price, given its
comparative lightness.
SuDoku:
The Boardgame: For the 3 people in Europe and
Japan who haven’t heard of Sudoku, and the maybe 250 million such people
in the US, Sudoku is the latest craze in newspaper puzzles. You’re given a
9x9 grid divided into 9 3x3 sectors. Some of the cells in the grid have a number
(1-9) in them. The idea is to fill in all the cells in the grid with a number
such that no row, column, or sector has a duplicate number. Sound like
fun?
Being an American, I am not a
Sudoku player. However, I am a fan of Reiner Knizia, and with visions in my head
of what Scrabble did with crosswords, I was interested in seeing what he (and
Kosmos) could do with Sudoku.
The
answer is: not so much. You’re given a Sudoku grid. You have to play
number tiles following the roles of Sudoku (no duplicates in a row, column, or
sector). You get one point for each other, pre-existing tile in the row, column,
and sector for which you play. You only have one tile in your hand at a time.
That’s it.
As a game, Knizia
mailed this one in. There is little, if anything, there. I still found it
modestly entertaining for one play; learning to see the Sudoku patterns was kind
of neat and I now do have some interest in trying out the puzzles sometime soon.
I can’t say as much for the game,
however.
Fettnapf:
I heard this game referred to as "this year's Geschenkt". Maybe. It's mainly a
memory game, with a bit of bluffing. Each player has a few "landmine" cards
numbered 10-30. The game is then played with a separate deck of cards numbered
0-9; each turn, play one card from your hand onto the pile, and announce the
running total. Once the pile exceeds 30, it starts counting back down, and then
back up again once it gets below 10. If your play causes the running total to
hit another player's number exactly, you get a point. This is bad. When one
player gets four points, the game is over, fewest points wins. Whenever the
direction of the count flips, another "landmine" card is revealed and handed
out, so things get tougher as the game goes
on.
I liked this, enough to go back and
pick up a copy after I had played. Like Geschenkt, it's simple, quick, tense,
and reasonably skillful. It's not a deep game, but fun for filler or an opener,
and good for younger players or mixed groups. Because it's basically a memory
game, it's not going to appeal to everyone, but really good small-box stuff like
this is rare and this might be one.
Posted: Monday - October 24, 2005 at 07:41 PM