Page 30 - Spielbox_Special_2021_gesamt_EN

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can advance your marker on the wedding track. Or you can support the church in hopes of building a monastery at the end of the round. Meanwhile, the winner of the trick takes control of the chosen city.
There‘s another scoring round at the end of the game. This takes into account the number of different regions where you control a city, monasteries, money, reputation or even power markers, which are awarded to whoever controls the most places in certain regions. It all sounds like solid Euro fare that should keep players busy for 60 to 90 minutes. (ab/sb)
Pegasus
When Andrew Carnegie died in 1919, the industrialist was incredibly rich. His for- tune amounted to $380 million, which was donated to foundations and char- ities. And that‘s exactly what we want to emulate in Carnegie: become rich, donate to the right causes and then get rewarded with an incredible number of victory points.
Of course, the new game by Xavier Georges is not about immersion, but rather about the precision of one‘s own planning. Exactly 20 moves are available to each player before the end arrives (which takes about two hours). The start- ing player dictates what action is taken — and everyone is bound to the same ac- tion, unless they use their one joker. So the game also rewards acting out-of-sync with other players so that you can gather benefits for yourself, while your competi- tors can do little to almost nothing with your choice of action.
There are four ways to use workers: The human resources department main- ly serves to move people into the places
where they will be urgently needed lat- er. The colleagues in administration, on the other hand, pro- cure cash and goods or plan new depart- ments.
Construction sends a sales representative to one of the four large sales regions in the U.S., who takes on an infrastructure, industrial, residential or commercial project there — which earns
points in the final scoring if you have connected major cities such as San Fran- cisco, Chicago, New York or New Orleans via the various projects (and if you‘re as far ahead as possible on the respective transport tracks).
Transport managers open up the Re- search & Development department (or simply R&D, as we business people say), which also expands your own projects, from which Construction field workers can benefit from later.
At the beginning of each round, the choice of action also decides whether players will get income from bringing back the field workers or whether one donates to education, human rights, public welfare or health care, which is mighty expensive, but also promises the manna of today‘s Homo ludens: victory points though, not God‘s blessing. This small excerpt alone shows that Carne- gie is likely to feel like comfort food for hard-core optimizers. Players who like to follow their gut, on the other hand, will probably have a better time heading into the kitchen to peel and mash some potatoes. (ab/sb)
Piatnik
Piatnik announced Raise as a “dicey card game“ by Matthias Prinz. Everyone has an identical deck of 30 cards, which they should divvy up carefully. Six cards are always in hand at the beginning of a round, and are used to pick the current score card, whose value is between 6 and 20. A player rolls seven symbol dice: one side is a blank, the other symbols are placed in order. Now everyone in the round bids one card face down. Its val- ue (1 to 5) is multiplied by the number of matching dice symbols. The result is plotted on a number line. Now the real action starts: The player furthest behind has to play more cards to pass the red lantern, and overtaking other players in this way means the task falls to them. Those who can‘t or don‘t want to play more cards are eliminated. The last or best player of the round receives the score card and the number cards played by the other players as booty, which also count for points at the end. After that, everyone draws up to six cards in hand. If you run out of cards too early, you‘re out of luck in this poker game. Cards that are not used, however, count towards the player‘s own score at the end. (sd/sb)
Plan B Games
The fighting creatures from Reiner Kni- zia‘s Colossal Arena have turned into mythical creatures in an enchanted for- est in Equinox. The game‘s idea has not changed at all, though. You bet on ani- mal species that will still be in the game at the end, with returns being higher the earlier you placed your bet.
You take turns playing a card from your hand. As soon as a card value is assigned to each creature in the current card row, the one with the smallest value is elimi- nated. The special abilities of the now 14 creatures, such as the toadstool Fungy or the two-headed Twinz, are mechanically unchanged from their 12 predecessors. New additions are the bird of prey Pilgrim, which allows you to take a visible chame- leon card (formerly: spectator card) into hand, and Grizzly Ursus, whose strength values are increased by half a point.
The cards, enlarged to tarot size, are attractively designed. Unfortunately, they take up a lot of space due to the six by nine layout. The printed symbols are of little help to newcomers, while the practi- cal card text in the earlier game contrib- uted to making the game play smoothly. Instead, one would have wished for at least a number or a designation to im- mediately find the explanation in the ap- pendix of the manual. Equinox still im- presses with strong and direct interaction (read: high annoyance factor), which you have to appreciate. (cc/sb)
Queen Games
Stefan Dorra‘s highly interactive game Buccaneer from 2006 appears again in a large, square box under the English title Pirates. While the basic mechanic of assembling a pirate crew and board- ing ships has been retained, the captain now also captures a steering wheel or an anchor during a raid, and these are worth points at the end according to a
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Photos: Pegasus Spiele, Plan B Games, Ravensburger