You may or may not know that the modern boardgaming world is actually a massive industry. One of the best ways to see this demonstrated is at the planet’s biggest boardgame event – SPIEL. This event, held in the city of Essen in Germany, is an annual pilgrimage for both the companies and designers who make games, as well as the many geeks who play them. At last year’s event in October of 2018, 190,000 gamers roamed the 80,000 square metres of the fair to check out 1,150 exhibitors attending from over 50 countries to showcase their latest releases.
With such a large array of new games being released each year, it’s possible to detect trends in the ever evolving hobby. Now that nearly a year has passed since the last SPIEL, the dust has settled and one can step back and get a feel for the titles that have remained standing. By looking at the games released at the fair that have continued to capture the attention of players and find their way to the table we can spot some of the current memes in the gaming hobby that are still going strong as we approach SPIEL 2019 next month.
Asymmetrical Play
While not a new concept, some of the games making a big impact recently have this element as a dominant feature. In asymmetrical games, every player is given a ‘faction’ that has a distinct way of interacting with the game and the other players, often resulting in a unique approach to achieving victory with that faction.
One of the hottest games in this genre would have to be Root. Following a successful international Kickstarter, this game saw its German language premiere in Essen. On first glance Root appears to be a fairly cute kid friendly animal game with some beautiful art from Kyle Ferrin showing animals such as birds, cats mice, rabbits and even a raccoon. However, don’t be fooled, under the hood this is essentially a war game. Each player controls a different faction of woodland folk vying for dominance of the forest. Players build buildings, recruit warriors, and engage in combat to control the various clearing on the board. Each of the four factions in the base game plays completely differently including how they move around the board, what kind of buildings they build, how they get more units on the board, and crucially, how they score points. While you can dive into this game without too much thought, play becomes so much more rewarding when you not only learn the intricacies of your own faction, but also how the other factions tick, allowing you to interfere with their plans while nurturing your own to fruition.
That desire to master all the factions, combined with deep but rewarding gameplay means that there is a lot of play here and Root has really stood the test of time. Since SPIEL in October it has seen a hugely successful Kickstarter for a second expansion with more than 20,000 backers pledging over 1.7 million dollars. It has also won a host of awards including a 2018 Golden Geek Board Game of the Year and 2019 UK Games Expo Best Board Game (Strategic Style).
Another highly asymmetrical game sitting in the all time top 20 on boardgamegeek.com currently is Spirit Island. It already had a strong following from its 2017 release but also saw the German language version premier at the SPIEL. In this reversal of the traditional colonisation theme players are working together to support the indigenous people of an island being invaded by new world explorers. You each take on the role of a spirit and must synergise to beat back the colonists either by directly attacking them, empowering the natives to push them back or simply by instilling so much fear in them that they turn tail and abandon the island themselves. Different spirits will focus on different strategies and they all have a unique play style. This is a fairly deep game that rewards repeated plays as you learn the strategies and try out all the different spirits.
Mind Reading
Working with or against other players using limited communication, often non verbal or even borderline telepathic, seemed to be another theme that came through at the fair, and has shown no sign of dying out yet.
In the co-operative game The Mind the players all try to synchronise their thoughts into one single hive mind. The premise is simple. There is a shuffled deck of 100 cards numbered from 1-100. Each round an increasing number of cards are dealt out to each player. All the team have to do is play those cards on to the table in ascending order. The catch is, you are not able to communicate with each other in any way. You need to go with your gut as to how long to wait before you play your card. Let’s say you have the 42. You will sit and wait for quite a while before putting it on the table to allow a player who is holding any of the 41 cards lower than yours to get them out first. Of course if someone plays, say the 39, you are not going to delay much longer before tabling your 41. Play a card too early and the team loses a life. If the whole team manage to play all their cards then that Level is over and you move up to the next Level, with each player starting the round with one more card than in the last Level. If you ever make it all the way up to the final Level (10 in a three player game) then you have mastered the game. I’m yet to get beyond Level 5.
While The Mind came out earlier in the year the buzz that had already been created meant that it still hot at the SPIEL and both it and the expansion that launched there, Level 13, sold outduring the show.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the exhibition halls another game from the same designer was being premiered. In Fuji the team of players are trying to move their pawns across a series of tiles to all escape the island before being consumed by lava. Each player secretly rolls a set of dice which have different coloured numbers on them. Each tile they want to move to has different dice requirements. You can only successfully move there if you meet those requirements better than your neighbours. The rub is again that you can’t just discuss this. While in Fuji you are allowed some communication, you are not allowed to discuss the specifics of the dice you have, only suggest how strong or weak your collection of dice are for the requirements of a given card. Again in this game you will only succeed if the team all get into the same head space. You can talk about being ‘fairly weak’, ‘quite strong’, ‘very strong’ and so on. Our group felt that both our effectiveness and our enjoyment was enhanced if we adopted the ‘bear scale’ – if I tell my team that my dice are “as strong as an adolescent bear with a hunting knife” on one spot, but as weak as a ‘”baby bear still in nappies” on another, then they have a reasonable idea how I am positioned. This game has probably hit the table more times since the SPIEL than any other game we picked up.
Other honourable mentions from the fair requiring you to get into someone else’s head include the ingenious competitive deduction game Cryptid and the team based game Shadows: Amsterdam where you play in real time giving non verbal picture based clues to your team mate.
Unique Games
A new genre of games emerged for the first time in 2018, the unique game, where every single copy of the game differs from the next.
You know that little niche game Magic: The Gathering, the one that has been on the go for 26 years and made Hasbro $2.45 billion in net revenue last year? Well it’s designer, Richard Garfield (featured in Geekscape 519) had a brand new card game to show the world last year, and there was a premier at SPIEL, just days before its full worldwide release. That game was KeyForge. The core gameplay has similarities to Magic: The Gathering, with two players putting creatures on the table that then attack the other players creatures. There are some interesting fundamental changes including the main goal of collecting Aember rather than dealing damage, and the way players pick one of their three ‘suits’ and then play and activate all cards in that suit, and only that suit, for that turn. But what really makes this game stand out are the unique decks. Unlike in Magic there is no deck building, players buy one or more pre-constructed decks which cannot be modified in any way, but every single deck in the world will be completely unique. Using procedural generation to ensure that all decks have an appropriate mix of different card types and a reasonable balance of three of the ‘suits’ (as well as a procedurally generated name) there are more than 104,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible decks. This intriguing concept results in a focus on getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of your own individual deck and the resulting fresh perspective combined with solid central gameplay has kept KeyForge alive, with one expansion out already and a third one set to release in time for SPIEL 2019.
Also showcasing at the fair was another unique game by another high profile designer, Corey Konieczka, famous for titles like Star Wars: Rebellion, Battlestar Galactica and Eldritch Horror. Discover: Lands Unknown is a co-operative game in which players find themselves stranded in the wilderness and must team up to find food, water and tools with a view to their ultimate goal of surviving. Published by the same company as KeyForge similar technology has been used to ensure every copy of this game is also unique. While one game might be set in the desert another might be in the frozen tundra or the jungle. In addition the combination of items and encounters is also unique to each box. Although this game generated a lot of buzz at SPIEL, subsequent reception has been a little lukewarm. While this game itself may not still be getting played in a few years time, more unique games will almost certainly be around the corner and that alone is an exciting prospect.
Roll and Write
Everyone has heard of the great granddaddy of roll and write games Yahtzee, and although it has been around since at least 1956, this genre as a whole has suddenly exploded in the last twelve months, while SPIEL 2018 being a clear indicator of the year that changed.
Like Yahtzee, the central mechanic of a roll and write game involves rolling a set of dice and then taking the results of those dice and writing them down in some way to maximise your score. Looking at That’s Pretty Clever, one of the biggest successes, in more detail is probably a great place to start. This was another title that was available earlier in the year, but really took off at the SPIEL. It now has multiple awards nominations as well as successful mobile OS ports. On your turn your roll six different dice, pick one of them to use on one of five corresponding coloured areas on your score pad and write the result in the appropriate box. Each coloured area works differently either scoring points in some way, or giving you power- ups to use later in the game. You then roll the remaining dice and pick another result, and repeat. Crucially all other players are involved during your turn (and vice versa) as whatever dice you don’t use they get to use for their score pad. The game strikes a great balance with quick and intuitive play but also meaningful choices.
Elsewhere in the halls, a pre-release version of Rolling Ranch was available to play. In this game each player is building a farm – putting up fences and building while placing animals within the enclosures. This time only two dice are rolled and all players use the same results to write on their farm pad. However the combination of numbers and icons on each die means that there are multiple possible ways to use the outcome of the roll and each player makes their own decision. The simultaneous use of the same die roll means that there is no down time with all players active all the time. While fairly simple in terms of choices there are just enough there to hold the interest on repeat plays.
Yet another new roll and write release was Railroad Ink, available in Blue and Red versions. It has a similar shared dice result mechanic with 4 to 6 dice being rolled for everyone to use each turn, all of which show different road or rail sections. The goal is to use the results to build a transport network on the dry wipe grid in front of you, scoring points for connecting exits, entering the middle of the grid and having the longest routes, while losing points for dead ends.
Elsewhere in the same hall was a roll and write game with no rolling. Welcome To… uses what is essentially a roll and write mechanic, complete with disposable player score pads and multiple different scoring options, but replaces the dice with a deck of cards. Again there is a shared pool of results to use from across three cards flipped each round, meaning play is simultaneous. Players are building houses in a suburban neighbourhood, and deciding when to add features like fences and pools. While this game lacks the physical neatness of other games that only have dice, a handful of pens and a scoring pad, it makes up for it by, for me, having both the deepest and most rewarding gameplay as well as the strongest theme of all the roll and write games I played at Essen.
What Next?
With all these games going strong almost a year down the line there is no sign of the associated mechanisms losing their buzz. In fact Root, Spirit Island, The Mind, That’s Pretty Clever and Welcome To.. all have expansions in the pipeline. We will see many of these at SPIEL 2019 in just over a month, but what will be more interesting to look out for in Essen will be the discovery of the next step in ongoing evolution of boardgames.
