Top 10 Games: Essen 2018

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!! Essen 2018 is upon us and as is traditional that means it’s time for the Creaking Shelves Top 10 list! It’s almost as exciting as actually having the games in hand. Almost. Maybe. If you’re lucky enough to be there I hope you have a great time! If not, then like me you can savour this anticipation for most of the next year as these exciting games filter out into stores. Oh my I just can’t wait!

1 – Teotihuacan: City of Gods

A new Mayan adventure from the designers of Tzolkin! Teotihuacan recounts the building of the titular city and great pyramid using fantastic rondel/dice as workers mechanics. You want to avoid going where others are, to keep things cheap, but it’d be nice to group your dice together to take more powerful actions. But you are also managing the value of your dice shaped workers, as each action they perform increases their value by one (experience, you see) making them better but – and here’s a trick – they will retire when they hit value 6! Unlike most of the games on this list, Teotihuacan is a game I have played and it is excellent! It was easily my favourite game at the UK Games Expo this year and I have been excited all year about getting a the final game.

2 – Blackout: Hong Kong

Sure to be high on many, many lists this year as Blackout: Hong Kong is the new big box Euro game from Alex Pfister, designer of the exceptional Great Western Trail, Mombasa and so many other titles that have all been extremely well regarded. In many ways I’m taking this on name recognition alone as any brilliance in the mechanics is not immediately leaping out to me from a glance over the rules, and neither are the aesthetics particularly inspiring. It says a lot about Mr Pfister that I will definitely be playing this as soon as possible regardless!

Set in… Hong Kong, during a… blackout, players take charge of relief efforts. But not in a co-operative way. There’s nothing official about your actions, it’s a very grassroots affair, and as such you each want your organisation to have helped the most during this crisis. So play your cards right (I promise I’ll only make that pun once this article) to gather resources, spread influence across the city, and distribute supplies to those who need it most. It’s a unique theme! And hopefully the parts all fit together to fill your tabletop with light.

3 – GùGōng

In imperial China, an attempt by the emperor to make bribery illegal has simply opened up the gates to a new, game inspiring means of greasing the wheels of government: gift exchange. But no one said these exchanges had to be of equal value! In GùGōng, you will exchange gift cards with the characters in each region to perform the actions of either the gift you give, the location, or both. Ideally you’ll play a higher value gift, although you can get away with playing lower, at some cost! This is such a neat system, tied to a historical theme. Very interested in trying this game!

4 – The Boldest

Feeling bold? The Boldest is the newest game from Sophie Wagner, designer of last year’s Noria, a game that may have slipped under the radar but was full of fascinating ideas. The Boldest is basically a blind bidding game, but where it’s as important to tactically lose bids as it is to win. Each round, players are committing hero groups to 3 expeditions. Whoever commits the strongest group to an expedition gets to perform an action, which is what you need to do to win the game, but also sends their strongest hero from that group to ‘see the king’ if you know what I mean, so their hand becomes weaker overall. Meanwhile, everyone else gets a new hero card in compensation. But you have the additional wrinkle that each of these groups have to all be made up from heroes of the same class, which determines the action you perform, so you need to manage your strength not just across your entire hand but across multiple groups within your hand. A really intriguing twist on traditional auction games.

5 – Ceylon

Time for a nice cup of tea. No! Wait! That’s different game! Ceylon is about the tea plantations of India though. You have a little player piece walking across the various hexes of a 3 dimensional board and creating or harvesting said plantations. The height of the plantations produce the different types of tea you can harvest. Then you’re fulfilling contracts and developing technology and other Euro stuff. I like the sound of this spatial centrepiece, but the core mechanism driving the game is also quite cool. On your turn you play a card and do one of the main actions depicted on the card, optionally spending resources to do multiple actions, and then all the other players also get to do one of the actions on your card. These play and follow mechanics keep everyone engaged throughout each round and force you to consider what everyone might be looking to do too.

6 – Passing Through Petra

Trading in the mountain pass! The beautiful Passing Through Petra may well fit just about anywhere thematically but that doesn’t make its core action selection system any less neat and enticing. You have a 3×3 grid with a player piece in it and each turn you move one space in any orthogonal direction (but not off the edge), performing the action associated with that direction. So you have interesting effects arising from that, like if I move left out of the centre to do action A, I cannot do that action next round because I am at the edge of the grid, but I can do Action C on the opposite side of the grid twice in a row if I have the resources to. Meanwhile, you’re managing a cycling row of traders which trigger key effects as they fall out of the queue in your player board. It all sounds nice and tightly interlinked. Which is what keeps me warm on a cold October night.

7 – Newton

My first play of Newton at Handy Con this August was an absolute treat! It looks utterly tedious – the beigest beige that ever beiged. But a really wonderful card play mechanic underlies it, in which each card played can again be triggered on future turns letting you really invest in certain elements of the game. I loved my play of it, though at least in part by just how powerful a setup I managed to build. My concern is that it would not be repeatable in future games and that without achieving that, I wouldn’t have nearly so satisfying a game. So definitely highly rated, but with some possible cause for concern that only future plays will alleviate. Always nice to have an excuse!

8 – Carpe Diem

A new Feld game is always on the list to seize but recent releases have never quite lived up to the past. Yet that doesn’t make them any less exciting as we search for glimpses of the past glories. Carpe Diem might be that game!? It certainly has a neat and interesting core that I already feel like I’ll love. A ring of 7 markets from which tiles are taken, each turn moving your pawn to one of the two opposite locations around the ‘ring’. It’s classic Feldien option limiting and luck mitigation. Those tiles go into your player board Carcassonne style, as you aim to complete buildings and features for an array of bonuses. It sounds simple, almost worryingly so as I suspect I am looking for something a little bit more complex. But I can already see the forward planning and tension that emerges from this system.

9 – Alubari: A Nice Cup of Tea

Another game I’ve actually tried! Alubari is the Chucklevision-themed worker place – oh wait sorry, no! It’s actually a game of building train lines and tea plantations across India. In a very different way to Ceylon. But it is still a worker placement game! A re-implementation of the 2012 classic Snowdonia, and while I haven’t yet played that, I understand Alubari is slightly freer, and more about setting up extra efficient plays through use of its new Chai resource. I really enjoyed my play of this and was astonished by how quick it played: an hour and a half for a full 5 player game! Sadly, it is only available to Demo but I recommend even that!

10 – Arraial

Party time! And not just because we are at the end of the article! Arraial is a portuguese street festival and nothing, nothing, says festival like playing cardboard tetris. Oh yeah, baby. I see you shaking those tiles! Charmingly illustrated and intriguingly constructed, Arraial really is the tetris of polyomino tile games, and yes, filling rows is rewarded! You are not just filling space, but also trying to best coordinate colours to attract your meepley guests. Adjacent tiles of the same colour earn you a matching meeple, but only once. So you want lots of separate blocks of matching colours, a real blended mix of activity, to make the best party going. It sounds like a lovely spatial puzzle. Who knows? Maybe I’ll need to compare this to Spring Meadow some time!

Honorable Mentions

They nearly made the list but not quite…! There’s Blue Lagoon, a new Through the Desert from Reiner Knizia which, having played it at Tabletop Gaming Live, is excellent. There’s Hokkaido, a new twist on the very neat card game Honshu. There’s the other Stefan Feld release, Forum Trajanum, and the new roll and write from Ganz Schon Clever designer Wolfgang Warsch, Brikks.

---

Let’s be honest, there’s quite a few exciting games out there in those vast halls! Hope you find something new and exciting! Drop me a comment with what games you are excited to pick up, especially those fun lighter games!