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receive eggs, honey, wool or milk and/or get money. Sunflowers planted on that field increase production. The objective is to gain high-value Field cards and to be
village. Once you have at least one good of each kind, you can terminate the game. In the end, you score for the destinations you’ve been to and the goods you have
backpack holds no more than three items, and only one of them may be heavy. But fortunately, there is also a fairy in the for- est, and her shop shows you the current trading quotations. -sd/sbw
Queen Games
“This is supposed to work?” The last time you asked this question was last fall, re- ferring to the cooperative game Team3 (Brain Games) – and, lo and behold, it worked fine. Way 2 Go is another coop- erative action game, and here also, the problem seems almost unsolvable. A group of up to seven participants is sit- ting around the table, trying to instruct a blindfolded player (wearing a mask) to draw a line along a path with an erasable pen without straying off the route.
The navigation of the drawing actions is done using a counter-clockwise game- of-telephone principle. This is made harder by assigning abilities and inabili- ties to each team member. Some players have to keep their eyes closed, others must not speak. In addition, messages are often transmitted by touching the right neighbor’s back or arm; therefore, this kind of communication needs to be agreed upon in advance. The “stop” com- mand is particularly important – if the active player’s drawing line gets off the path too often, all players together lose. Of course, the level of difficulty can be raised more and more here as well. The cards provide increasingly demanding tasks. Sometimes, guiding players may communicate only in a secret language that the next player has to “translate.” Other times, players may not talk at all with the drawing partner but communi- cate solely by touch. And finally, there are different paths that need to be mastered, and a team variant in which one team tries to catch up with the other, although the latter has a head start of 20 seconds. Probably it’s best to first watch a group playing Way 2 Go in order to understand what’s going on; if you are involved, you’ll catch only parts of it. -sd/sbw
A slim body of rules in combina- tion with great depth of play is always appreciated. Both elements apply to Zen Garden, invented by the Greek author Mike Georgiou and released by a pub- lisher of Indian descent (see also p. 34). The game is set in an artificial landscape in the centuries-old Japanese tradition. Each player creates his own 16-square
CELTIC: Second chance
able to use a suitable dice-rolling result as often as possible so that there’s a lot of cash flowing in.
The game comes with three expansion modules: one, the “Jump-Start Module,” with freely selectable cards; another one with special actions that give the organic farmers exchange options, for example; and the third one with certain goals, such as having a fully stocked farm store or a minimum number of sunflowers – or of Burlap Bags, of course.
Wunderland has gotten a second chance; in 2013, this game was put on the market by Pegasus in cooperation with the Wunderland miniature exhi- bition in Hamburg. In that game, play- ers travel various parts of the world via miniature railroad and collect postcards along the way; now, the game has been revised – and not just in terms of the theme: Under the title Celtic, players visit fifty locations in the Wetterau region of central Germany. As in the original game, the others can join in from the same start- ing location when somebody moves one or more markers from his stack one or two locations forward.
This way, you distribute your markers around the board, the objective being to complete three destination cards. A card is fulfilled once you have your own markers sitting on the locations indicated on the card. Alternatively, you can get trade goods by returning markers to the
collected; their values, however, are differ- ent from those in the predecessor game. The winner is appointed successor to the
Celtic Prince of Glauberg.
Piatnik
-sd/sbw
The reason for the name Roundforest doesn’t become quite clear when you read the instructions. The forest spaces are laid out in a square formation, but these spaces are actually octagons. Might the reason be that a forest space is al- ways rotated in the indicated direction as soon as a figure enters it? This rotation can make you feel dizzy, and actually, you are on your way to different places in the forest in order to get copper coins. These copper coins need to be converted into silver coins, then you exchange the silver coins for three golden apples. And after that, you can trigger the end. Provided you don’t owe anything to any forest crea- ture any more, you then receive the emer- ald ring and win the game. Alternatively, you can directly obtain a golden apple for particularly clever conduct when you meet characters. To this end, you need to collect or trade the right items before- hand. Therefore, you should pay attention to where you can move from your current position and what color tile is lying on your destination space. This allows you to carry out different actions that help you to win this orienteering race through the woods. Efficiency is in demand: Your little
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