All Essen Games, all the time ... almost
OltreMare, Garden Gnomes, Gärten von
Alhambra, Einfach Genial, Ys, Reef Encounter
OltreMare: This is a new trading game from Mind
the Move. You try to acquire commodities in sets, much as in Bohnanza,
Civilization, or Zubercocktail. The gimmick here is cards that serve a variety
of purposes. Each turn, you load goods that determine the parameters of your
next turn - so if I load a cloth, say, it will have a set of icons determining
my hand capacity, number of goods I can load, number of cards I can draw, and
how far I can move my ship. That's about it. I think the problem with the game
is that it's basically like the other good, simple trading games (Bohnanza or
Chinatown), with some extra stuff added in that really doesn't quite work; there
is no functioning "second idea" here, and the primary idea - trading for cards
with escalating values - has already been done better. The "board" element of
the game is almost completely gratuitous and adds little (and may in fact
subtract due to the serious imbalance in the harbor tokens). Each player has a
"pirate" stack of discarded cards that I am hard-pressed to explain the purpose
of. As a whole it's not bad - it's fairly hard to make a terrible trading game
at this point - but it's a classic small-press game, decent but with too much
extraneous stuff, significant rough edges, and a balance that feels off. In this
case, there just aren't enough meaningful player choices and the trading is
somewhat desultory. I certainly wouldn't veto the game if people wanted to play
it - the game basically works, which is something - but for me this was not
close to a buy (even assuming I
could).
Garden Gnomes: Again, this game
got a slightly mixed, but overall still reasonably positive, response. This is
an experience game, something that you enjoy the process of playing, because
while you can definitely play well or poorly and feel like controlling your
destiny, there is still a big luck factor. But it's a lot of fun to play in my
opinion, an interesting blend of a serious and light game. We played with 5, and
verified it's a bit better with 5 than 4. And it played very differently with a
different set of people, always a reasonably positive
sign.
Gärten von Alhambra: This is
just not my kind of a game. In the draw-one play-one genre, I've come around to
Carcassone: Hunters and Gatherers, but that's about it (except for the classic
stupid-but-fun game Nuclear War). This reminds me of Dirk Henn's Iron Horse (aka
Metro), in that you do a lot of fairly uninteresting work to figure out where to
play your one tile, but lose anyway because there is such a big variance in the
quality of the tiles given a certain game state. Never mind the big kingmaking
problem. On balance though it's definitely not a painful game, as long as people
don't take forever and the game comes in at a sensible 45 minutes or less. You
can play it with friends and have fun if you have nice friends, but not my cup
of tea as a game.
Einfach Genial: I had
somehow managed to not play this game before now, even though it's been pretty
popular amongst people whose judgment I trust. It is of course completely
abstract, but the Tigris & Euphrates-style scoring, combined with the fact
that's it's interesting but still straightforward, and challenging but not a
huge brain-burner, makes it a rather engaging game. I liked it, and Kim liked it
even more; we'll probably pick up a copy. As is usual with Knizia's bigger-box
stuff, this will take a few plays to come to an understanding
of.
Ys: Remember when I said it was
cool to play Garden Gnomes with a new group and see how it played very
differently? Well, it was modestly disappointing to play Ys with a new group and
see it play almost exactly the same. I seem to be in this odd state of enjoying
my games of Ys reasonably enough, approving of it as a solid enough game, but I
can also see clearly that once it loses it's "new game" appeal, it's going to
fall off a cliff.
Reef Encounter: Now,
at last, we're talking. I bought Reef Encounter with some reservations, since
Richard Breese's games published under his own label (R&D) have been close
so often without ever quite making it. After playing a bunch of Essen stuff that
has not managed to deliver - Garden Gnomes is overall a win but would ideally be
a bit less chaotic; Ys is lacking spark; Heart of Africa is probably just bad;
OltreMare is OK but rather rough - now we have one that, on initial impressions
at least, can finally deliver the
goods.
Reef Encounter feels like a
throwback to the great tactical/resource management games of the mid-to-late
90s, a genre that seems to have faded a bit - stuff like Tigris & Euphrates,
Union Pacific, Ursuppe, El Grande, or Lord of the Rings. You're managing
colonies of coral, protecting them with your shrimp, and trying to grow them in
size so that they can feed your parrot fish. You can strengthen your species of
coral so that they can encroach on your opponents ... but the situation is quite
fluid, so quickly your coral will be gone to feed your parrot fish, but the
coral species you strengthened is now being used by your opponents to beat you.
It is certainly most similar to Tigris & Euphrates from the 10,000 foot
view, in that you are using different color tiles from behind your screen to
grow colonies of coral (kingdoms), then claim them with your shrimp (leaders).
Here, though, the conflict is much simpler and rarer (it's more border
skirmishes than conflicts, and shrimps once placed can't be evicted), but the
resource management is more interesting - you draft tiles instead of picking
randomly, and need to manage "energy cubes", acquired through drafting or
successful conflicts, that you need in the right colors to perform almost every
game actions in addition to just
tiles.
I really liked Reef Encounter.
Obviously, this is a fairly involved game so one play is not enough to judge,
and can even be deceptive - but it sucked me in in a way that the other big box
games of the year, with the exception of Goa, haven't quite managed to do yet.
It's not overly complicated once learned - significantly simpler than Tigris
& Euphrates I think, although the rulebook doesn't make it easy to learn.
Also like Tigris & Euphrates the board state changes a lot, so I'm not sure
there is a huge amount of long-term strategy on offer, although there clearly is
some, but that just seems the nature of the genre and there are a lot of choices
and tough management decisions throughout. And the theme and variability that is
so lacking in Ys is solidly delivered here. R&D games have always had
basically solid themes, but usually with some weird stuff thrown in (like the
bizarre resource allocation procedures in Keydom), but here it's without
glitches and is consistently well done I think. And the game is quite pleasingly
colorful - not to be sniffed
at.
Anyway. More play will be required
to see if this is just solid, good, or if it's even great. But I'm glad I bought
it after all, and am fairly optimistic.
Posted: Sunday - December 05, 2004 at 11:17 AM