Essen 2008 – Steel Driver

Martin Wallace is releasing an extra game in the Treefrog line at Essen this year. This will be the third Treefrog game and is called Steel Driver. It is a railway game for three to six players and takes around 60 to 90 minutes to play.

Further details including the opportunity to pre-order are on the Warfrog website.

Essen 2008 – Kamisado

Peter Burley is the designer of one of my favourite multi-player puzzle games: Take It Easy. He has a new pure abstract game coming out at Essen this year called Kamisado. The game looks very attractive and colourful and, on reading the rules, it appears quite deep and chess-like in that it rewards the ability to look forward several moves.

The game is published by Burley Games and further details can be found on the Kamisado website.

2008 International Gamers Awards

The winners of the 2008 IGA have been announced. In the multi-player category the winner was Agricola, designed by Uwe Rosenberg and published by Lookout Games / Z-Man Games. The winner of the two-player category was 1960: The Making of the President, designed by Jason Matthews and Christian Leonhard and published again by Z-Man Games.

Both games are excellent and their choice as award recipients does not come as any surprise. Congratulations to the designers and publishers. More information about the awards can be found on the IGA website.

Next SBC session

The next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will take place on Friday 26th September 2008 and will be at Garry’s house. If there’s eight of us this week, which seems likely at present, I’m planning to split into two tables of four.

Deutsche Spiel Preis

The winner of this year’s DSP has just been announced. The winner was Agricola, designed by Uwe Rosenberg and published by Lookout Games / Z-Man Games. The complete top ten was:

  1. AGRICOLA Uwe Rosenberg (Lookout Games) 
  2. STONE AGE Michael Tummelhofer (Hans im Glück)
  3. CUBA  Michael Rieneck und Stefan Stadler (eggertspiele)
  4. IM JAHR DES DRACHEN Stefan Feld (alea/Ravensburger)
  5. TRIBUN Karl-Heinz Schmiel (Heidelberger Spieleverlag/MOSKITO-Spiele)
  6. HAMBURGUM Walther “Mac” Gerdts (eggertspiele)
  7. GALAXY TRUCKER Vlaada Chvatil (Czech Games Edition)
  8. KELTIS Reiner Knizia (Kosmos)
  9. WIE VERHEXT! Andreas Pelikan (alea/Ravensburger)
  10. METROPOLYS Sébastien Pauchon (Ystari)

Next SBC session

Apologies for the need to cancel last Friday. I did eventually get through the floods and got through the door at 7.20pm. Anyway, barring other natural phenomena, the next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will take place on Friday 12 September 2008 at Garry’s house.