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duel, players try to reduce the number of opposing ships on the contested planet to zero. First, they secretly set a Tactics token to determine their strength in attack or defense. If both rivals then still have ships on the planet, they play numbered hand cards, maybe even boosted by Reinforce- ment cards, if applicable. This way, the ownership of the planets is determined. Hidden envoys, faction abilities, and bonuses for the winner or the loser pro- vide quite a few surprises. -sd/sbw
Feuerland (Keymaster Games)
The beautifully illustrated game Parks invites players to take hikes. In four rounds, players send their two hikers out to collect tokens. These are needed in
shouldn’t dawdle for too long, though: As soon as the next-to-last figure reaches the final space, the last figure on the trail has to move there directly. Each round, the trail is extended by one more tile, thus providing a few more possibilities of action. For instance, you can now take a photo; photos score additional points in the end. Or you can buy gear, e.g., can- teens. If you refill these bottles on your way, you gain additional privileges. At the end of a hike, there are extras in store for you, such as the starting player marker for the next round. Then the trail is laid out anew, the weather forecast is announced (which entails that additional tokens are placed on certain spaces), and the next trip begins. How quickly you want to advance is up to you. The rules booklet even includes a solitaire variant, yet it is amazing how compact the instructions are. -sd/sbw
Haba
The detectives in The Key follow an unusual investigative approach: They are supposed to deliver their result as soon as possible, which can – understandably enough – lead to a hectic rush. Three crimes have been committed, and all of them are to be solved at the same time. The clues are spread out as a jumbled pile in the middle of the table: witness state- ments, fingerprints, video surveillance photos. Every card shows a color code, and only one of these colors matters in a round. The detectives pick cards of that color, read the texts on the back of the cards, and take notes behind their screen with an erasable pen. Which of the three suspects has committed what crime, at what time of day, and what, for instance, was the loot?
Players have to combine five clues. The first player to figure these out grabs the color key from the middle of the table; the others may go on, though. At the final scoring, it is first of all important that the clues have been assigned correctly; for this, players check the individual number codes. Then they put the key in the current color in a solution-template. If the color of the key and the lock match, the result is correct. Finally, everybody adds up the clue points on the cards he needed; each card has a different value. The player who grabbed the key may dis- card one of his cards. Whoever has the fewest points wins.
The new The Key series has been invented by Thomas Sing (Die Crew). According to a company statement, the games remain suspenseful even after you have played each color once, the reason being that different investigator cards are drawn in every game. The Key - Raub in der Cliffrock Villa and Mord im Oak- dale Club both work fine also in the soli- taire version. -sd/sbw
Heidelbär
The word deduction game Decipher is based on the “Letter Piece Game-System” of the Eon game Runes that the company, together with Jack Kittredge, developed further. As in the original, players use let- ter pieces to form words. You try to come up with a word that is hard to decipher, and then the others try to guess it. To this end, you pick all the letter pieces you need and keep them hidden. Then you, as the “puzzle maker,” give one of them to one of the “word seekers”, and he has to place the letter piece in the right position within the word. A board in the box inlay clearly shows the length of the word and each letter position. In addition, all play- ers can see on the box aprons how each letter is composed. Here, somebody has put some thought into it and seen to a functionally optimal course of the game. If the seeker places the letter piece in the wrong position, the mistake is shown in such a way that nobody has to memo- rize this problem; besides this, the puzzle maker gains one point for this. The seeker keeps going until he finds the right posi- tion. A word seeker may at any time give a token to the puzzle maker and take a guess. The sooner he does that, the more points he’ll score if he is right.
From a certain information level on, heads start spinning as players want by all means to decipher the right solution from the fragmentary known details. At that point, the actually competitive game often changes to open joint consider- ations, which the puzzle maker then vehe- mently refuses to tolerate – more or less successfully, depending on the composi- tion of the player group. -cc/sbw
Hub Games
It’s the year 2100. Rising sea levels cause a shortage of settlement areas. Therefore, people have started building their cities on platforms – at least in Megacity - Oce- ania. Each player takes on the role of a
THE KEY: Piles of clues
order to be allowed to visit the national parks on display. You manage to do so only when one of your hikers ends his trip by arriving at the last tile of the variable trail. This is where you may also relight your campfire. In most cases, this fire has gone out somewhere along the way, since this is the price you have to pay for plac- ing your hiker on a space that is already occupied by another hiker. Thanks to the relighting, your second hiker now also has the opportunity to join another hiker. You
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