A guildie and I went to the monthly boardgame fest a WotC person and a former WotC person run out of their house last Sunday. A guy named Phil (who works at Paizo) brought a bunch of German games he bought from Essen 2006. So we got to play some new games!

Nacht der Magier – a neat push pieces around an elevated game board to get somewhere while others are pushing against you on their turns game…

Los Mampfos – a memory based donkey pooping game.  yep.  I’m not sure how long the novelty would last and I don’t really like memory games much…

Haste Bock – a fun sheep herding game with some crazy antics.  The German version is played on a grid rather than just on a table like the American version…  I think I wouldn’t like the free-form version.  Anyway, each players has a deck of cards with moves they can do each turn, and they all compete for placement of their two sheep within the herd of sheep.  Good game with some strategy.

Quelf – a zany game with loose resemblance to Cranium, only each player takes control of a specific character (like Mr. Lugnut or Super Ninja Monkey) and the questions are often trick questions and the things you have to perform are often totally off-the-wall.  This is a great game and could be really fun with “normal” folk but would require a level of comfortableness with the other players and a willingness to do stuff.  For example, one stunt requires you to play leap-frog with an opponent, which would be kinda awkward (as it was) with strangers who you don’t know how out-going they are…

also played:

Acquire – played the old 1971 version.  It was good and bad.  There was a lot of down-time between turns since we had 6 players.  I think it would be best with about 4 players.  An abstract game representing company take-overs and purchasing and selling of stock in those companies.

Universalis – a story-telling game.  Unfortunately, it was presented to me as a game where we make up the rules of the game… That really isn’t the case as there are no game-mechanics or game-design elements to this game… It really is about sitting around a table and telling a story like Once Upon a Time but instead of playing cards to introduce story elements, you have to purchase the elements with tokens from a preset number that each player starts with.  I’m not much a fan of story-telling games.