Category: Interesting Stuff

Game Predictions for Tabletop Season 4

Wil Wheaton has a huge impact on game sales, getting your game on that show is like hitting a gold mine. He is currently selecting games for his upcoming 4th season. He has opened up his criteria for what he is looking for in a blog post here. On that note here are my predictions for games to be featured in season 4, with my most confident choices first.

Boss Monster

This one’s a slam dunk IMO. Its geeky and easy, fun and thematic. If it’s not on Season 4 then my Grandpa’s a monkey’s Uncle.

Colt Express

Winner of the Spiel Des Jahre, great visuals with the 3D train and play’s out like a movie. It would make great TV which ultimately is what Mr. Wheaton is looking for.

Machi Koro

Cute art, super simple mechanics. My only reservation is that is plays better with an expansion and I think he would know this. I still would be shocked to not see it included.

Spyfall

He likes to do a few ‘party games’ and this seems the obvious choice because its certainly the funniest to watch. It does play better with more than 4, so he may pass and pick Codenames instead.

New York 1901

A few lightweight gamer games are always selected and this one is beautiful and very streamlined. Some have called it a future competitor to Ticket To Ride. They’ll need to start making more if thats the case…

One Night Ultimate Werewolf

I think Bezier Games will get one on this season. This one will take the role of the Coup/Resistance style game. He may also pick Suburbia though as a heavier game

Agricola

Its complex I know, but he did Five Tribes last year. This one is a classic and he’s not shy of tackling big games like this. It’s time to get farming baby…

Mysterium

He has already done Dixit, but this is different enough and cosidering he has done Pandemic, Forbidden Island and Desert, I don’t think that’ll matter. It’ll create awesome discussion and the bits are fantastic. He always does at least one co-op games and this is gonna be the one.

Survive: Escape from Atlantis

Its old, like 80’s old, but its still not that well known and a tonne of fun and will scratch that kids game he likes to do.

Red 7

He usually does a little card game bit, such as Sushi Go! This one is very clever and would be interesting to watch. My reservation is that it’s really short, like 5 mins short, it’ll be part of a 2 game episode I would assume.

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Others considered and rejected:

Star Wars Imperial Assault – Just too complicated, plus he already did X-Wing
Flash Point Fire Rescue – If it hasn’t been done yet, I don’t think it will
Codenames – better with more than 4 and he’ll do Spyfall instead
Star Trek 5 Year Mission – Almost put this one, he’s a super nerd and hasn’t done a Star Trek game yet, but the theme is quite weak in this one.
Dungeon Fighter – his posh table makes it hard to play this game with all the strange dice bouncing you have to do
Flick ’em Up – the flicking on his felt table wont work and he is doing Colt Express as the cowboy game
Bohnanza – he’ll do it one year, just not sure if this is the one
Citadels – see above
XCOM – Its kind of real time, which he said he wont do.
Suburbia/Castles of Mad King Ludwig – He’ll only do one per publisher I believe (One Night Ultimate Werewolf this year), next year though…
Roll for the Galaxy – Maybe just too obscure
7 Wonders – I don’t think that the simultaneous play will work on TV
Cash and Guns – pointing guns at each other, not sure that is something Wil would be cool with, he should be though.

tabletop tv

The Art of the Auction – A Reiner Staple

Dr. Reiner Knizia loves the auction mechanic. They are littered everywhere in his games, which is good because he is really good at developing a game around them. Below I will run through some of his more prominent auction games, focusing on the actual auction mechanic used as opposed to the game itself. They are all down here at IBGC to be tried should any of them intrigue you

High Society – This 20 minute beauty has a standard auction. That is, offer a bid and then go around the table raising the offer, or passing. If you pass you cannot bid again. Player who bids the highest gets the property.

The tweak in this game is that you bid with money cards that are fixed in value. $1(million), $2, $3, $5, $8….$20, $25. You cannot bid $16 unless you have the exact mix of cards to make that bid and if you win an auction those cards are lost, leaving you with fewer options to bid with (i.e. if you have a $1, $4 and $20 left and someone bids $7, the lowest bid you can make is $20). Extra evil twist…at the end of the game person with the least money automatically loses 🙁

RA – In this game players are given 3 or 4 fixed bidding tiles ranging from 1-16, e.g. 2, 7 and 16. You try to win Egyptian stuff with them (Reiner likes Egyptian stuff) . An auction is once around, so you get one shot at winning and if someone raises you, tough, no Egyptian stuff for you son. However part of your winning haul will be the tile that won the last auction, which will be part your ‘hand’ for the next round. Part of the valuation you will make in the hauls worth is how good that tile is. Win Egyptian stuff that also includes bidding tiles that are 1’s and 2’s and you won’t be winning much more Egyptian stuff next round.

Dream Factory – This is another standard auction, but this twist is that it exists in a closed economy (no money enters or leaves the game from the original amount). You are making movies and trying to win the stars and directors, but other players will put those stars up for auction and win the money you offered, so if you get in a bidding war with someone over an actor you need you are making another player very rich and able to outbid everyone in a later auction.

Amun-Re – More Egytian stuff up for auction (Reiner REALLY loves his Egyptian games). This one uses a pyramid auction with fixed amounts that you are allowed to bid (0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21….). The brutal part of this game is that the number of provinces you are bidding on is equal to the number of players playing, so you will each win exactly one province a round. If someone outbids you, you must bid immediately on a different province. To bid on the original province again, you have to hope that someone outbids you on the new province you just bid on so that you can move your offer again. Once every province has a single bid on it, the auction is over.

Taj Mahal – on the surface this doesn’t seem like an auction, but it very much is. There are 5 things to win and players play cards to try and win 0-5 of them. They can play cards 1 or 2 at a time and each cards is a bid for one or two of the items on offer. If at the start of your turn you are leading the bids for any of the items on offer, you may drop out and take them. However, whatever you bid you lose, even if you win nothing at all…very mean indeed (I’ve seen people go very strange colours in the face playing this game. In fact I think I once bid a tonne of cards and got nothing and possibly had a slight stroke I was so upset).

Modern Art – ALL THE AUCTIONS. In this game you try to win art by doing once around auctions, standard auctions, a secret one time bid auction (put your bid in your hand and everyone reveals at the same time) and name a price auction (as in I set the price and you each get a chance to take the offer. First to accept it, gets it). Truly an auction overload!

Medici – This one involves a once around auction. You each get one chance to make an offer on a set of goods, whoever bids highest gets it, in this case however, you are bidding with your points which you need to win the game. This is one of the worst games in existence IMO, but its one of Jack’s favorite ever….try it to find out which camp you are in (if its Jack’s camp then you are wrong!)

Reiner Makes You Do the Splits

A way designers try to create tension in a board game is to force a player to divide his attention, usually by offering several sources of points. The idea is you can’t just do one of the things to win, you should be thinking about all of the ways to get points. In most current board games a player can mostly focus on one thing, only dabble at the other stuff, and still get away with it.

Reiner Knizia is having none of that. You will be divided. You will be torn. You will suffer making these decisions. Suffer deliciously. Here’s a quick look a two of my favourite Knizias to see how he splits your gameplay and focus. It’s a lot more interesting than “I’ll pay 4 to go up on the god track too”.

Tigris and Euphrates – Score the Worst

Different sources of points in the game have different colours. When you get a point, it comes in that colour. At the end of the game, the colour you have the least in is your final score. You can have 25 kabajillion blue points, but if you have only 2 red points, your final score is 2. T&E forces you to really think about the other colours and truly divides your attention. Yeah, you figure Johnny’s only a point or two behind you on green and catching up, but you have to do something about your blue points or you might end the game without any points at all. So you let Johnny have it and hope he forgets about his red…

Samurai – Most Mosts

Samurai is another Knizia game with different kinds of points: rice, nobles, and buddhas. At the end of the game, you compare everyone’s scored tokens. If you have the most of a particular kind you’re one step towards victory, but not quite there. To win the game, you have to win “the most” for more kinds of tokens than anyone else. Since there are only 3 kinds of points and only around 20 pieces total to be fought over, these are super-tight, razor-close victories. Only dabbling in another kind of scoring token doesn’t help you: you have to win the most for it to count. Samurai does give an observant player a new option: screw up your opponents. You can burn points other players have stakes in. You can score points for other players so that they tie on points of that type; a tie is not the most, it’s a tie.

Del

Spyfall – Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Sound like I knew Where I Was!

Party Games, there are 23.7 million of them. How to stand out? Put in some rude words? Make people do some silly things? Ask some inappropriate questions? Have a big quiz? They all work because there are lots of different people whose idea of a party differ.

Well here’s one more to add to the mix, and its just different enough to stand out from the crowd to be making quite a splash already.

We’ve tried it out in the Cafe a few times and are aware its not for everybody, but those who will like it, will love it.

Game play:

The game takes place over a series of 8 minute rounds in which you earn points. Play to an agreed number of rounds, most points wins.

Each round select a bag of cards (from a selection of 30, for 30 different possible locations) and give one card to everyone face down. It’ll tell you if you are the Spy OR Where you are.

So this is what you know every round:
– One of you is a Spy (“You mean its the Resistence?” No its nothing like the Resistence)
– You are all in the same location, which most of you know.
– The Spy does not know where they are.
– Only the Spy knows who the Spy is.

In each round the Spy needs to find out where they are OR not get revealed. Everyone else needs to figure out who the Spy is. At any point during the 8 minutes if everyone agrees on who they think the spy is or the spy reveals themselves and guesses where they are; the round ends. Else, after 8 minutes the group must have a guess on who they think the spy is.
To do this players take turns asking questions. The questions need to give players an opportunity to prove they know where they are while giving the Spy room to hang themselves by. If they are too specific though, they will give away the location and the Spy will win, too vague and you’ll run out of time before you can narrow down who the Spy is.
If the Spy wins they get 2 points, else everyone else get 1.

Examples:

Q: What are you wearing?
A: A Wetsuit.

Great we know that you are not the Spy, but you’ve also helped the Spy narrow down their location to only water based places.

Q: Are you a morning person?
A: Yes I am, I have a lot of drive in the morning?

Nice answer, we know we are in a mechanics, a cheeky mention of driving probably means you are not the spy.

When asking or answering the questions, the pressure is on. You need to think fast and come up with something on the fly. Some people can do that and others can’t and will find the pressure quite unpleasant. It is however, a game that you get better at. Practice makes perfect as they say. The first few rounds will be a bit of a mess and the Spy will either give themselves away very quickly or figure out where they are very quickly. It won’t take long before you get better and that is when they brilliance of the game shines through. The subtle Q&A as the Spy tries to give confidently vague answers and everyone else looks for the ‘nudge nudge’ answer that will clear them of accusation.

Fans of Dixit will love this, so will Resistance addicts. You will need to find the right group though. Introverts will likely find the pressure awful and it only takes one person not enjoying themselves for the game to break down.

Its unlike anything else out there though and well worth a try.

spyfall

Murder Mysteries in Victoria

A lot of people ask about whether we carry Murder Mystery games. We don’t, but we do recommend a local fella in town who runs them for you. Like modern games, Murder Mysteries have come a long way since the days of a few envelopes and ‘find the killer.’ Nowadays, you’ll be given a full role, with a background, secrets and even special powers you can use during the game. You’ll be given 4 or 5 tasks to complete in order to get your own personal victory.

I participated in one a couple of months ago, we had about 20 people and it had a 1920’s speakeasy theme. We all got dressed up, 20’s style, and rented the upper section of The Guild on Wharf Street.

I was the city Mayor, with ambitions to run for President. However, I had a drinking problem and in order to fund my illicit boozing I had sold my wife’s engagement ring. I was also having an affair with a local singer as well. My tasks were to:

get drunk (in the game), but not so drunk I embarrassed myself (I also tried to do that in real life as well)
find out who had fixed the horse race and bet on that to get money to buy my wife’s ring back
Not let anyone find out about my affair
Help the detective find the murderer.

So a lot to do in 3 hours, keeps you very busy with little downtime, but lots of laughs and play acting. People will approach you with strange requests as they try to complete their tasks…I had three ladies break into dance in front of me to try and impress me with their Charleston skills.

The cost is very reasonable, usually this works out to about $20-30 a head, which includes helping to find and rent the venue, all the preparation (which is substantial), some food at our event, and not having to deal with the headache of running the dam thing and being free to have fun on the night.

If this looks like an advert, it is. We are not taking any commission here though. Chris, who runs this is a local guy who has been a vibrant member of the local gaming scene (he runs Day of Board Gaming and the Board Game Jam) and has struck out on his own to do this full time. We want him to succeed as its just another great way to bring people together to have fun. If you are interested, please email him at

chris@enigmaticevents.com

or visit enigmaticevents.com for more data.