By W. Eric Martin
August 10, 2009
Designer: Richard Breese
Publisher: R&D Games
Players: 3-6
Ages: 8+
Playing time: 60-75 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Languages: English & German
Price: €35 (€40 for both R&D titles)
Link: 
Richard Breese releases a new game once every two years or so through his R&D Games, and his title for 2009 is unlike any he’s released previously. For one thing, the game includes dice. For another, it has a marketing tie-in in that the game will celebrate the tenth anniversay of BoardGameGeek.com (BGG), the go-to site for game information, in both game play and artwork.
The BoardGameGeek Game, as this title will be called, started life as Retail Therapy, a shopping game in which players tried to collect certain items in various shops. While players seemed to enjoy the game, they also suggested that shopping would never be a favored theme, so despite Breese’s own satisfaction with the theme, he started to consider other possibilities. “My friend and professional game developer Rüdiger Beyer, who is married to Barbara Dauenhauer who does my translations, had, in character, the inspiration to suggest that the game should simply be about boardgamers shopping for board games!” says Breese. “They were visiting me in Stratford upon Avon at the time, and the idea of using the local area as the setting arose from these discussions.”
Knowing that BGG would celebrate its tenth anniversary on January 22, 2010, Breese thought to marry a game about shopping for games with the website that provides tons of info for doing just that. The Geek’s creators Scott Alden and Derk Solko were happy to get involved, so Breese then started contacting publishers and designers. “This year will be my nineteenth trip to Essen, so it was fairly easy to contact the people I knew,” he says. “There were over thirty companies who were happy to let me use their images. I also contacted one or two of the graphic artists for specific permissions. Everyone was happy to be involved, which I think is a testament to the Geek in particular. There were a couple of companies that I did not get a reply from, but that may just be that I didn’t have the appropriate contact details. In the end I didn’t actually want any more contributions as I was running out of room. When you see the full board you will notice that shop 6, which I did last, got rather full!” (Click on the thumbnail image at the top of this listing for a composite image of a portion of the gameboard and BGG’s mascot, Ernie.)
The BoardGameGeek Game, which will debut at Spiel 09 in October, has 3-6 players taking on two roles. First, they represent one of six game publishers – Eggertspiele, Hans im Glück, Queen, R&D, Treefrog or Ystari – and they want to supply their games to game shops and sell them to earn Geek Gold (GG). The gameboard has six shops on it, and to avoid stepping on one another’s toes too much, each shop will carry only a portion of a company’s catalog. In game terms, store #1 will carry only games numbered 1 and 2, while store #2 will carry games numbered 1, 2 and 3, and so forth. “The GG earned from a sale is higher in the higher numbered shops,” says Breese. “Game tiles are initially placed face down. The decisions are whether to play a tile into the highest numbered shop it can go into in order to maximize potential income, whether to play it onto the bottom shelf or the top shelf [which affects how long a game is available] and how many games to deliver.”
Players start play with a few of their games in the warehouse and receive more in subsequent rounds, as in Knizia’s Modern Art. Players are free to place any number of games in a store during any of the six rounds, but since players can buy only three games per round, flooding the market won’t necessarily lead to sales.
In addition to serving as publishers, players control a team of three geeks who want to collect sets of games in order to satisfy the needs of their game groups. The geeks are represented by dice, and after being rolled in the middle of the round and placed in the appropriately numbered store, players can choose to spend GG to reroll a die or move a geek to an adjacent store. Once all the players have passed and the geeks have stopped jumping around, players take turns laying claim to games on the shelves. At the end of six rounds, they earn GG based on how well they’ve assembled sets of games from across the publishing spectrum – or all of a publisher’s games, when playing with only three – and the player with the most GG at game’s end wins.
Why, after two decades as a game designer, is Breese only now introducing dice into a design? “I have always avoided dice until now as to me that was not what ‘German’ games were about,” he says. “In the UK the games market is not particularly developed and most British people still relate boardgames with dice, but those dice games are not generally what I would want to play. I think, after twenty years, I have now gained the confidence to add dice into the mix.”
I think used in the right way, dice can add a little fun into a game,” he continues, “and a little ‘groan’ or ‘yes’ factor. Yspahan is a good example of this. In TBGGG the dice enable the geeks (buyers) to arrive quickly and for the game to play quickly. There always will be a little luck in what you roll, but generally this will average out, the cost of moving is not high and the dice rolled can be used to determine your strategy. The dice were introduced very early on, largely for the reason mentioned, and in TBGGG I am happy with the part they play. It was a case that they were the right ingredient to use, rather than starting off with a view to producing a dice game.”
Unlike Breese’s most recent release, 2007’s Key Harvest, which was co-published by Rio Grande Games and Abacusspiele, TBGGG will be published by R&D Games on its own. Says Breese, “Because of the nature of my requests when approaching other companies for the use of their graphics, it did not seem appropriate for me to then to produce the game as a joint venture with any other companies.” Breese says that the title might be re-released by other companies at some point in the future, but the packaging and theme would be changed due to the number of permissions required to use the game images.
You can preorder TBGGG by emailing Breese; no deposit is required – only collection of the game by the end of Friday, after which time Breese will sell them to the public. “The run will not be as large as Key Harvest as I am doing this as an R&D game only. However I am confident that there will be sufficient copies of the game after Spiel and that these will be available in the U.S. at a competitive price.”
"First impression, by W. Eric Martin
Version played: Prototype
Times played: Once, with six players
I played a prototype of this game at the 2008 UK Games Expo when it had a different theme, different board layout, different almost everything, so I’ll limit my take on the game to the following: Retail Therapy had a typical Breese-ian feel to it in that the game play was thoughtful and challenging but not exuberant. Yes, you’re competing against other players to both sell your goods and collect the games that you need, yet you’re not spiking them in the forehead with direct attacks – only trying to nudge in front of them at the checkout line to make off with the choicest items before they can beat you to the punch.
No comments:
Post a Comment