Category Archives: News

Boardgames in the News: Drawing Out the 2018 World Chess Championship

The World Chess Championship is run by the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), and in recent years has been settled on a two year cycle with the reigning champion playing against the winner of the Candidates Tournament. The Candidates Tournament is an eight player double round-robin tournament and this year was won by Fabiano Luigi Caruana, an Italian-American Chess prodigy. Currently number two in the world rankings, Caruana become the youngest ever Italian or American Grandmaster, earning the title in 2007 at the age of 14 years and eleven months. Caruana is playing Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen (known as Magnus), a Norwegian Chess Grandmaster. Carlsen is currently number one in the world rankings, a position he has held since 2010, when the became the youngest person to achieve the highest rank at just nineteen. In 2013 Carlsen won the World Championships for the first time, retaining the title in 2014 and 2016.

– Image by Unsplash contributor sk

This year the protagonists are very evenly matched, ranking one and two in the world and separated by just eighteen months. What is remarkable though is just how evenly matched their Chess has been: the World Chess Championship is a twelve match game played over three weeks, and for the first time in history, all twelve matches have ended in a draw. Each of these matches was played against the clock with a maximum possible time of over three hours. Since these ended in a tie, the players will be challenged further by increasing the speed of play, increasing the chance of errors. Thus a series of four “speed chess” tie-breaks will initially be used to decide the match each taking approximately half an hour. If this fails to separate the combatants, there will be up to five mini-matches of best-of-two blitz games (five to ten minutes each). If the match is still tied, this will be followed by an an “Armageddon” game where White starts with five minutes on the clock and Black with four minutes, with both players receiving a three second increment after sixty moves. In the case of a draw, Black wins.

– Image by Unsplash contributor Felix Mittermeier

The tie-breaks will be played on Wednesday 28th November, with the winner taking 55% of the €1,000,000 prize pot, and of course, the title of “World Chess Champion”.

Boardgames in the News: Does “More Mainstream” = “Less Friendly”?

Modern board gaming has always been a very inclusive and friendly hobby, if niche. For example, people attending conventions often carry games home for friends, but more surprisingly, they also often carry games for complete strangers. This can require trust from either or both parties: sometimes it is the “mule” who pays for the goods, sometimes items are preordered and paid for in advance and then collected by the “mule” and posted on. Similarly trusting are those that take part in the “Maths Trades“. These are multi-person trades which happen in a loop with everyone receiving a game from one person and giving a game to somebody different. Obviously if one person fails to honour their part of the deal, the whole thing breaks down. Yet these things happen on a huge scale with hundreds of people participating, and although there are occasionally problems, most people are very happy with the result and take part again and again.

– Image from lautapelit.fi

As the hobby grows, the first signs of change are perhaps becoming visible. For example, earlier this year voting for the Deutscher Spiele Prize was closed four days early due to attempted vote-rigging. It seems an online video blogger claimed he had a special deal with the publishers of one of the games in the running, KLONG! (aka Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure), Schwerkraft Verlag. He posted a video syaing that if the game won the award, he and all the followers of his YouTube Channel would get a promo card for the game. Schwerkraft denied any involvement, but around a hundred votes were cancelled (about half of which only placed the one game) and other people were unable to vote at all because voting was stopped prematurely. The organisers of the Deutscher Spiele Prize say Azul‘s position at the top was never in doubt and KLONG! would not have won in any case. It might have improved on its eventual seventh place though, perhaps threatening the positions of Heaven & Ale and Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 (which finished in fifth and sixth respectively).

– Image from kickstarter.com

Perhaps this could be seen merely as a gamer trying to game the system, but whatever, it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. More serious was the series of thefts from stalls that occurred at Essen this year. It was not the first time money had been taken from a stand—famously, at Essen in 2016, Ludicreations had a cash box stolen, containing about €3,500. R&R Games were also robbed that day, but the Ludicreations theft is known more widely thanks to their response. Such a loss can be very significant for a small company, so inspired by the theft, they designed a game called Steal this Game and launched it on KickStarter, raising over $50,000. This year the fair grew and so did the thefts. Six companies fell victim this time, Artipia Games, FoldedSpace, Greenbrier Games, Gotha Games, Hub Games and Japanime Games. Reportedly, the thieves got away with a total over €20,000, but not without loss themselves as staff on the Artipia stand (ironically demoing their new game A Thief’s Fortune) realised what was happening. Although they weren’t quick enough to stop the theft, they succeeded in detaining one of the decoys.

– Image by boardGOATS

There is no suggestion these crimes were carried out by boardgamers, in fact, the Police have said that they were a professional team. Two people distracted the cashier by bombarding them with questions and a third then swiped the cash-box. Efforts are now underway to recoup the losses which were mostly uninsured. Japanime Games are collecting donations, while Artipia Games have launched a KickStarter campaign for five promo cards. Attention has also turned to trying to prevent the same thing happening next year. There have been calls for more vendors to take card payments, however that is not without its problems. This was amply demonstrated at the UK Games Expo this year which coincided with a Europe-wide Visa systems failure leaving many gamers unable to pay for their purchases. There is also a question mark over whether the infrastructure available at the Messe would be able support everyone moving to card transactions at such a bug fair with such a large commercial component. For these reasons, Merz Verlag (the company who run Spiel) are focussing on increasing security and making it much more visible. Conversation is still on-going and it remains to be seen how much these changes will alter the feel of the show. One thing is clear, however, the wider world has discovered our little hobby and that brings some unpleasant consequences.

– Image from spiel-messe.com

Essen 2018

Last week was The Internationale Spieltage, the largest games fair in Europe and, arguably, the world, known to Gamers worldwide simply as “Essen”. The fair runs Thursday to Sunday in mid/late-October every year and is the one of the biggest and most significant of all the boardgame conventions with many new releases and timed to coincide with the end of October.

– Image from spiel-messe.com

This year several of the group went, and despite a lot of games selling out really early, they came back with expansions for well-loved games like Kingdomino (Age of Giants), Isle of Skye (Druids) and Altiplano (The Traveler), some new games like Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, Solenia and Key Flow, and some old classics like Mississippi Queen. It will be exciting to see how these new toys go down with the group over the coming months.

– Image used with permission of boargamephotos

Now We Are Six – Happy Birthday to Us!

BoardGOATS is Six Years Old Today!

Yes, unbelievably boardGOATS is still here after six years, still meeting fortnightly in the Horse and Jockey in Stanford-in-the-Vale. Of the six people who were present at the first meeting so long ago, five are still coming; the group has grown, but still has the lovely, friendly, social feeling we cherish. We would like to thank to everyone who has come along in the past and in particular, all those travel regularly from further afield. Without you, boardGOATS wouldn’t be the success it is, so we really appreciate it. We’d also like to thank the folks at the Jockey who have always been so supportive, and let us have so much fun in their back room.

Boardgames in the News: Stop that Goat!

Yesterday, a young female West Caucasian tur, a kind of mountain goat, made her Great Escape from Paignton Zoo in Devon. Just like Steve McQueen (but without the aid of a motorcycle), she jumped a fence and disappeared into a nearby dense wooded area. Staff and police have so far failed to catch her, but despite her horns she is a naturally timid goat and is not thought to be dangerous. Apparently she is not making her way to Oxfordshire to join us for out 6th birthday party on Tuesday as she has been seen and “herd” in the local area and zoo staff are trying to entice her back with a few tasty morsels. Maybe they should just try smiling at her…?

– Image from twitter.com

Deutscher Spiele Preis – 2018

This week the The Deutscher Spiele Preis, or German Game Prize list was announced with first prize going to Azul. Typically the Deutsche Spiele Preis rewards a slightly heavier game than the the Spiel des Jahres awards, but for the first time since Dominion in 2009, one game took both awards. This year we haven’t played many of the games on either list, but our first game of Azul was shortly after it’s release at Essen last year and our local groups have played the spots off it since. So, it is no surprise to us that it has been recognised by both the Spiel des Jahres Jury and the voters from the industry’s stores, magazines, professionals and game clubs, as well as taking the French award at Cannes, the As d’Or and the Origins “Best Family Game of the Year”.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Other games that featured on the top ten list included the winner of the Kennerspiel des Jahres award, Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg (currently only available in German) and one of the runners-up, Heaven & Ale. The Mind, which received a nomination for the Spiel des Jahres Award, also featured in the top ten, as did the inevitable Pandemic Legacy: Season 2. Other than Azul, the only game we’ve played is Altiplano, and that squeaked in at number ten, but Rajas of the Ganges and Clans of Caledonia may feature in the not too far distant future. The Deutscher Spiele Preis for Best Children’s game went to Memoarrr!. The prizes will be awarded at the Internationale Spieltage, Essen.

– Image used with permission of
BGG contributor Vacabck

Boardgames in the News: How to attract a Goat

It has been shown previously that dogs and horses have the ability to discriminate human emotional facial expressions. This is thought to be a by-product of their close working relationships with humans during domestication. Because dogs and horses are required to work together an understanding of human emotional facial expressions is actively an advantage making the attribute self-selecting. In contrast, goats have been exclusively domesticated as production animals and as such are less likely to have been selected for reading subtle communicative cues from humans. A study carried out at the Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats, suggests otherwise however.

– Image from pexels.com

A total of twenty goats were tested (eight females and twelve males), receiving a total of four test trials each. Each trial consisted of a pairs of greyscale still human faces of the same individual showing positive (happy) and negative (angry) facial expressions and over all the trials, the goats’ first interactions were more often with the positive image. They also tended to spend more time with the positive image compared to the negative one, indicating that goats can distinguish between human faces conveying different emotions. These results suggest that goats are attracted to “happy faces”, and have been reported by McElligott and co-workers in the Royal Society journal Open Science.¹

– Image by boardGOATS

¹ Nawroth, C., Albuquerque, N., Savalli, C., Single, M-S., McElligott, A. G., R. Soc. Open. Sci. (2018), 5, 180491; doi:10.1098/rsos.180491.

Boardgames in the News: Who are PAI Partners and what do they want with Asmodee?

A couple of months ago, Reuters reported that according to un-named sources, investment bankers had been hired to run the sale of Asmodee. The claim was that the sale “could value the company at over €1.5 billion”, but there was no credible information as to who the potential buyers were. This mystery has now been solved with the announcement that PAI Partners have entered into exclusive discussions to acquire Asmodee, a company with an enterprise value of €1.2 billion. So, who are PAI Partners and what do they want with Asmodee? Well, PAI is a European private equity company, that grew out of the merger between the French banks, BNP and Paribas in 1993, with a management buyout completed in 2001. They have invested in a wide range of companies covering everything from yoghurt (Yoplait) to tyres (Kwik Fit) to cargo handling (Swissport). Obviously PAI are interested in making money from Asmodee, but at this time there is no evidence to suggest that would by by asset stripping. Price increases would be almost inevitable however, as the Studios would be under pressure to provide a good return on the investment.

– Image from paipartners.com

Spiel des Jahres Winners – 2018

The 2018 winner of the coveted German Game of the Year or Spiel des Jahres award is Azul. This has been a very popular game within the group and to us has been the stand-out game this year since Essen. It is very easy to teach with a surprising amount of depth and is beautifully produced, making it a game we are always happy to play. The Kennerspiel des Jahres was awarded at the same time. This honours more challenging games and this year was awarded to Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg. So far this has only been released in German, so we have not been able to play it yet. In addition, there was a special award for for Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, which the jury felt was the benchmark against which all other legacy games should be judged. The Kinderspiel des Jahres award was announced last month and went to Funkelschatz (aka Dragon’s Breath) which is dexterity gem collecting game.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Boardgames in the News: Playing with Your Food

KickStarter is a crowd-finding platform, where people seek financial support for their latest, greatest idea. All sorts of bizarre and unusual things can be found there, as well as a lot of boardgames. One of the more curious projects currently seeking financial support is “The Edible Games Cookbook“. Designed by a professional game designer cum amateur baker, the hard-back book presents a series of “food experiences to play with friends and family”. The campaign page says that players “might be required to crack a secret code that’s baked into cream puffs; keep a straight face while eating something gross; conjure up a delectable morsel from a mishmash of ingredients; perform “sacred”, food-related rituals; test their memory and taste buds … and that’s only half the games”. There is a sample chapter available, if you want to have your taste buds tickled, and the project runs until Friday 20^th July 2018.

– Image from kickstarter.com