Page 32 - Spielbox_Special_2021_gesamt_EN

Current. Fall Preview 2021
Hadrian‘s Wall.
Under the ”Leichtkraft“ label, the company released Michael Schacht‘s fast-paced card game Magellan Elcano. As for the theme, the game is about Magellan‘s expedition that launched with five ships in 1519. Up to five captains participate in this game, and they are all competitors, trying to collect ocean cards. Each round, three of these cards are revealed – one in red, one in blue, and one in green. The players‘ identical crew card sets show values in these col- ors; at the beginning, you get five cards, and then only two more after each round. How many crew cards do you bid, in turn, for the displayed ocean cards of the corresponding col- or? Should you play another card? Or do you pass, hoping
not to be overbid? What makes it tricky is that some of the cards can be used for two colors, but that they have different values, depending on the color chosen. Neverthe- less, when you play the cards, you have to decide to what color to assign them. Only the player with the highest bid gives up cards; the others get their bids back, so that the number of hand cards varies a lot during the game. The player with the most valuable ocean cards after six rounds in this easygoing and brisk gambling game
you have fulfilled a task and can put a sound disk on the target space. The first player to place four disks in different rows wins.
Don‘t be fooled by the lovely visual ap- pearance of Paul Solomon‘s Honey Buzz: There are quite a few challenges in this relatively upscale family game. Players manage their own bee colony and build a hive from double hex tiles. They get the tiles by placing worker bees and, later on, calling them back in time. Of course, it is possible to let additional worker bees hatch. If the proper structure of hex tiles has been put together in such a way that it shows a hole in the middle of the area formed by six filled-out spaces, special ac- tions are triggered. Plus, nectar that was previously collected from a meadow can now be deposited in the hole. Once this has been successful, the honey production can start, for which there is a market with flexible values. And of course, there are also special contests to engage in. Quite a lot for the bees to do within a playing time of up to 90 minutes, at least in the advanced players‘ variant. (sd/sbw)
Spielefaible
Designer Thomas Spitzer is still very well- known for his coal trilogy: Ruhrschiff- fahrt 1769-1890, Kohle & Kolonie, and Haspelknecht. Schichtwechsel (“Change of Shifts“) is about coal again, but now set in the year 1950. After WWII, coal mines were an important engine of reconstruction, and each player runs one of them. Players transport coal and slag from their pits and get coke from their coking plants. At the beginning of the round, the starting player draws cubes out of a bag and thus, originally enough, distributes coal, slag, and rising pit water to everybody. Later on, players not only deal with the transport of the goods in their wagons; in addition, the progress on the three routes (road, rail, and canal) symbolizes the onward transport of the goods. Two to four players work for up to one and a half hours above and below ground. Under the project title ”Die letzte Zeche“ (”The Last Coal Mine”), Schicht- wechsel was a contribution by the ”Fair- Spielt“ game group of the Spielezentrum Herne to the RAG Foundation‘s ”Glück auf Jugend“ funding project. It was in- tended to honor the achievements of coal mining on the occasion of the coal phase-out. (sd/sbw)
also stand for “heavyweight“) in terms of the box contents alone. In addition to some small wooden figures, the box contains two full-sized pads with 200 (!) sheets each. Each of the up to six par- ticipants gets one sheet from each pad per game, so that you have a large area strewn with many little rectangular spac- es in front of you. You use one of the sec- tions to build the Roman fortifications; this is necessary because — after each of the six game rounds — the evil Picts turn up, and the more of them that break through in three sectors, the more points that are deducted.
The players try to prevent this by set- ting up a few cohorts at the very front to hold the attackers off. Unfortunately, this costs you resources — resources that you would rather use to erect buildings so that citizens (such as merchants, priests or civil servants) can settle there. To this end, you use resources that you get be- fore each round, and that you also gen- erate by using and filling out spaces on your own sheets — almost every second space gives you an extra and triggers chain reactions. This is a highly variable but extraordinarily solitary affair, with all players simultaneously puzzling and making or removing strike marks on their sheets. Only sometimes do you surpris- ingly swap things. After a good hour, the player with the best equipped city behind the rampart wins.
is the winner.
Skellig Games
(sd/sbw)
30 spielbox special
With Uwe Rosenberg‘s Armonia, Skellig wants to continue the story of Sagani from last year. Again, the theme is about sound disks, but Armonia is a dice game for eight years and up. To begin with, you roll the seven dice on your turn, trying to get four-of-a-kind; with this, part of your task on the gameboard is done. If you don‘t manage this right away, you can save identical dice values on the board and fill these up in the next rounds. Af- ter that, you reveal a task tile to the right of the respective row of the gameboard. Now you need to arrange the dice in a specific jigsaw-piece-like formation. How- ever, you need to place the dice in a grid in such a way that dice with identical val- ues come to lie in a row, and dice in a column show ascending values. Once you take two more steps per line in this way,
Photo: Spielefaible