BGG’s Spielwarenmesse/FIJ/GAMA 2023 Preview highlights nearly two hundred games that are being demoed at those three conventions ahead of their release in 2023 — and now that Spielwarenmesse has ended, let me catch up on a few titles shown at that trade fair. (I did not attend the fair, which turned out to be fortuitous since I was sick for most of the previous two weeks. It would have been a bummer to travel to Nürnberg, Germany, then been too ill to do anything!)
• In addition to previewing nearly twenty upcoming releases at Spielwarenmesse, such as a German edition of Cat in the Box, publisher Pegasus Spiele debuted at a game directly at the fair: Istanbul: Choose & Write by Rüdiger Dorn.
Your goal in this 1-5 player game is the same as in the original Istanbul game: Collect rubies as quickly as you can. In Istanbul, you have a central merchant figure that moves around a central market, dropping off and picking up assistants to take actions and paying other merchants a fee when you act in the space where they stand.
Istanbul: Choose & Write retains the feel of the original game in a manner akin to a roll-and-write game, except that you get to choose an action for your turn. Each player has their own bazaar sheet, and on a turn you play one of the two location cards on the table or the location card in your hand, then each player takes an action in the chosen location or any adjacent location. However, when it’s not your turn, to take an action you must cross out an action icon in the chosen location or a bonus action icon; if you can’t, then you gain a bonus action for later.
Explanation of the bazaar sheet in the rulebook
Alternatively, you can play a guild card on your turn, then pay the cost on it to take an action just for yourself, but you pick these cards up only at the guild hall…which takes an action.
To collect rubies, you’ll earn lira, buy goods, swap or sell goods, take the current caravan action, or use the wainwright to improve a location’s payout.
• Pegasus serves as a distributor for German publisher Deep Print Games, and that company showed off the 2-5 player game Triqueta from frequent design partners Stefan Dorra and Ralf zur Linde.
The initial description makes the design sound like a straightforward drafting and collecting game:
In each round, you and the other players draw animal tokens and place them in multiple rows. Find the perfect moment to grab your favorite row, or you might be stuck with one you do not want. At the end of the game, you score especially well for your triquetas. For more than three tokens of the same type, however, you will lose points instead…
The graphic design of the pieces is a nice touch, emphasizing that three shall be the number, and the number shall be three. Collect a fourth, and it sits on the side of the triqueta, not fitting in. Five is right out.
Triqueta is due out in Q1 2023.
• Christoph Post from Brettspielbox reported that the fourth MicroMacro title from Johannes Sich and Edition Spielwiese will be released at the end of 2023, completing that hideous city and giving you yet more criminals to hunt.
Image: Brettspielbox
