Back from Spiel and hoo boy, where to start?
Master of Orion: The Board Game - resource juggler and tableau builder based on the famous 4X space sim. Plays four in about an hour. I liked, unfortunately it sold out while I was playing.
Tallinn - another tableau builder, this time a microgame where you try to score the best sets in three types while building secondary sets for end game scoring. Bought.
A Feast For Odin - Uwe Rosenberg's latest iteration on filling out boards. All the best bits of Caverna and Agricola combined with the multi-player Patchwork people have been hankering for. Bought. Also for sale: one copy Caverna, lightly played.
NOT ALONE - asymmetric card game where one player is an alien trying to hunt down the scientists who crash landed on its planet. Simple but effective. This one was the surprise hit at Essen despite the lack of buzz beforehand. Bought.
Cottage Garden - the other Rosenberg game at the fair. Players collect variously shaped tiles from a market grid, trying to fill garden plots. It wasn't bad, but I didn't buy it as a friend did.
Wongamania: Banana Economy - the new international edition of WongaMania. Streamlined for faster play, and now with an advanced game mode where stocks and properties can have different values. Much improved and well worth buying. I didn't buy it myself as I own the original, but I managed to sell two copies to other people and was rewarded with a nifty Debtzilla pouch.
First Class - a card drafting tableau builder where you try to construct three train routes and move your engineers and train along them. Mechanically sound, but I think it favours player order hugely and in a game where you only pick 18 cards, the opportunity cost of passing on one to become first player is too high. Not bought.
Fabled Fruit - not quite a legacy card game, but close. You have six action cards and you use them to collect fruit. With the right fruit you can buy one of the cards, which come in stacks of four, and add a new card to the display. The legacy bit is that the cards are all numbered, and when you start a new game you fill the display with the first six action cards that were in play at the end of the last. There are something like 40 or 50 different actions and in our demo game we only got as high as 10, so it takes a lot of games to reset. I liked it, but I did not buy it. It'll do to fill out an order discount some other time.
