Hi all!

This weekend we’ve been at the Spiel gaming convention in Essen, Germany.  There’s a lot to say, but I’m writing this from our hotel in Essen and I don’t want to take the time for a full report just yet.  But a few quick notes to you gamer geeks out there on the games we’ve seen, ranked in decreasing order of coolness:

1. Accused — one of the most fun indie games we found.  It’s by a single developer in the UK, and he’s working hard to get it off the ground.  It’s a neat twist on the detective game.  The shtick is that, once again, there has been a mystery in a small British town.  In this game, however, all the players have been accused and are under investigation.  The truth, of course, is irrelevant — the important part is fixing the evidence so that you look innocent.  You start by randomly selecting three town locations from which to build your “story” of where you were when the deed went down.  Then the body is placed and the murder weapon is selected.  (How inconvenient for you, if your story ends with “and I spent most of the evening at the library, studying”, if the victim turns up dead at the library.  Not that that happened to me, or anything.)  You then are dumped with a pile of “guilt” evidence, all of which points at your malfeasance, and a tiny amount of “innocence” evidence with which to help prove that you never knew him and were nowhere near the place.  About 3/4 of the game is a fairly snappy mechanic for moving around the town to hide/erase your guilt evidence, pick up new innocence, bribe (or kill, heh heh) inconvenient witnesses, and mug your buddies or plant evidence on them.  But the really fun phase is the end-game.  As soon as some player walks into the police station, the game “ends” and the trial begins.  Now begins a battle of wits, as you each try to establish your innocence, explain away any nasty “guilt” cards left in your hand, and pin the blame on your friends.  This is the fast-talking phase, and is, IMHO, the most fun single aspect of the game.  “How unfortunate for you that half the people in town hated you, and three of them ended up strangled to death during the game.”  When all is said and done, the players vote on who gets convicted.  And after you send the poor schlep off to the slammer for the rest of his natural born days, then you get to reveal the “truth” cards and find out who actually committed the crime.  Not (yet) available in the US, though he’s working on getting it there.
2. The Stars are Right — a very clever and novel pattern matching game based (somewhat loosely) on the Cthulhu mythos.  Cthulhu makes everything better.  Unlike most pattern matching games, this one also involves a bit of puzzle solving and forward planning, as you work out fairly elaborate move sequences in order to arrange the stars to the liking of the elder gods whom you are trying to summon.  As you summon more small things, you become more capable of summoning big things, but the pattern matching and planning become correspondingly nastier.  Probably coming to a game store near you in the US in the near future.
3. Pandemic — has been released in the US for a few years (Z-Man games, I think).  But it’s a very nice cooperative game about, what else?  Saving the world.  Specifically, from a gaggle of nasty plagues.  (We didn’t really need Miami anyway, did we?)  Quick game play that increased the sense of urgency — gotta move fast before the bugs get out of control!  Fun game.
4. Munchkin Quest — the very newest Steve Jackson Games product.  World premier here at Essen and we were lucky enough to play it with some great Germans.  Nice game.  If you’ve played and enjoyed Munchkin, this is probably your kind of game.  It has enough of the old Munchkin cards and mechanics to be familiar, and enough new elements and mechanics to be novel and allow you to discover new facets.  And, yes, brand new ways to screw your buddies.  ;-)
5. Urland (?) — Nice game by the same couple that produced Ursuppe (Primordial Soup in English).  A basic territory conquest game, cast in terms of evolution of lungfish onto the land.  The nice twist is “evolution” cards that allow your icthyoids to acquire talants like flight, teeth, care of young, etc., which help your icthyoids beat out the other icthyoids in the race for land dominance.  Appears to be a couple of years old, now, and I’m not sure you can get it in English, but it’s a fun game.  Fun for adults, but I think it could be played by, say, an eight-year-old.

Those are the highlights, I think.  I’ll leave off the games that sucked.  ;-)

More on the trip later.  Enjoy!