Spiel des Jahres

The nominations for this years Spiel des Jahres has been released.

Dixit Official Site | BGG

Identik (Portrayal) Official Site | BGG

Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age Official Site | BGG

a la Carte Official Site | BGG

Fresco Official Site | BGG

Out of all the games I think Dixit will win. It's a very good game that would suit families. It's not too complex and looks very nice. Roll through the Ages is a good game and one I enjoy playing and Fresco looks like a nice euro game but I am not sure if there is anything that new in its mechanics.

So, Dixit gets my vote.

Dungeon Lords

It's been a busy week of gaming with two meets. The first we played a couple of fillers No Thanks and Franks Zoo followed by Power Grid.
It was a close game with all of us rushing to build 17 cities, We all managed it but only Dobbie could power then and scored the win. I think it was the closest Power Grid game I have played.

Later in the week we had a P.O.B. meet and I finally managed to give Dungeon Lords a go. It turned out to be a pretty clever but unforgiving worker placement game. I enjoyed teh game but played it very badly ending up loosing all my dungeon in the first year. I was then on teh back foot and managed a final score of -2. Not the best. A few early mistakes seaaled teh deal, I was just too evil and the Paladin decided that my dungeon was in most need of being cleansed. I think he must have had a bottle of Cilit Bang with him as it was sparkly white when he was finished.

Its a very good game and now on my wish/want list. I want to give to another play, just so I can beat my negative score.

The rest of the evening was filled with filler games, No Thanks, Franks Zoo and Pack'n'Stack.

Automobile

We had a mini game session on Friday night and Ed chose Automobile as the main game of the evening. If anyone knows Ed he likes his economic games and Automobile was a pretty good one. I have mixed reviews of Martin Wallace games, I appreciate the technical aspex of the game but I find them a little hard to get my head around. Brass lived on my shelf for ages till I managed to get it to the table. Perikles is still there.

Automobile is all about building car factories, recuiting sales people and producing cars and selling them. Its a balancing act of building as much as you think you can sell, with unsold cars loosing you money. I was suprised it only plays for 4 turns, and the game lasted about 2 hours. I suspected it to last a little bit longer.

I won the game, not sure how I managed it but I went for a high end approach, building as many high end cars as I could and making sure they were all sold. Mid range cars bulked up the rest of my production. It seemed to work as I had only a few loss cubes, mainly for having sales guys twiddling there thumbs.
I will be happy to play it again, now I know what to do its definately going to make a difference. Also I thing the next play may be a little bit more aggressive, we were all playing fairly and not trying to under cut each other.

We had a little more time after Automobile so I pulled out Dominion Seaside as the others haven't seen or played with the cards. It was a good game but I just couldn't get my money engine running. We managed to end the game with all the points cards being bought up. The last province card ended the game, never seen that before.
I had enough cards to beef up my hand each round but no where near enough money in it to actually buy anything. Lesson learnt.

The house now has an Ipod Touch so I need to spend some time on teh app store looking for those board game conversions. The only problem I can see is wrestling the thing out of my sons hands. I may have to add another one to a virtual basket sometime soon.

New Games

I haven't bought as many new games recently. Mainly because I have been trying to hold back and the other is I have been buying a few games on the Xbox. Most months its either one or the other.

Well today I have ordered up a few games.

Macao
No Thanks
Franks Zoo
Are you the Traitor?
Cthulhu Dice

Originally I was looking for a couple of card games to take on holiday. I always envision playing a few games while sitting in the sun but it doesn't always happen. My kids are happy to play but its difficult finding games that are portable and playable for them. Last year Uno and Colloretto were both played heavily, Uno I can take or leave while I do enjoy coloretto.
I am hoping that Franks Zoo and No Thanks will hit the spot, and I am tempted to take along Carc. Mainly as we will be 45 minutes away from the real place and a visit is going to happen.

After adding the light games in I tend to look for something for me, Macao was a good price and it sounds like a nice game. The Spiel guys talked about it a few eps back so it was added to the basket. The others were just fillers to bulk up the order.

Hopefully these will be delivered by Monday in time for some testing next week. I am also going to try and dig out a chess set so I can start teaching the kids how to play. Maybe I should start with Checkers!