Game announcements are spilling forth from German publishers as they prepare for the Spielwarenmesse trade fair at the start of February 2023. Schmidt Spiele has revealed more than a dozen game releases for the first half of 2023, and I’ll look at four of them in this post, starting with Mille Fiori: Die Meisterwerke, an expansion for 2021’s Mille Fiori from Reiner Knizia.
Here’s an overview of this expansion, which like the base game is for 2-4 players:
To set up, place the new game board that extends the sailing track next to the game board. The game now contains Doge and Dogate cards that bring points, changed movements, or a different order of play. A little council of influential citizens, the Signoria, advises the Doge and influences the political events of the city.
Nine different masterpieces can be gathered along the advanced sea route that leads to lucrative trading cities, or through the Dogaressa, the Doge’s wife. If you receive a masterpiece, you can immediately collect valuable points, while also using the masterpiece to fill the shop window. If you choose wisely, you can score additional points at the end of the game.
• In Café del Gatto, a game for 2-5 players from Lena Burkhardt and Julia Wagner, you want to serve valuable drinks to customers, but you’re competing against other baristas for coffee and milk, so making drinks will be tricky!
Also, you’re a cat, but that doesn’t seem to have any effect on your ability to create drinks as follows:
On a turn, take one of three actions:
— Take 2 coins from the bank.
— Buy a tile from the espresso machine, with the cost of the tile being equal to the adjacent tile on the opposite side of the machine. If you’re buying a milk tile, for example, the cost is the value on the adjacent coffee tile. Tiles in the top two rows have a 1-2 coin surcharge. Place the tile in the lowest empty matching space on one of your drink tiles, then draw a tile from the bag to refill the machine. If you buy a 1 tile, it comes with a bonus sugar cube.
— Serve one or more completed drinks. For each glass tile that has all its spots filled, first gain coins from the bank, earning more coins if the drink has fewer symbols in it. (Mixing cold and hot tiles isn’t good!) Next, take a completed drink tile of the same type that has a value equal to or less than the sum of the tiles, gaining coins to make up the difference. You can raise the value of a drink by 1 for each sugar cube spent.
Gameplay example
At the start of your turn, you can spend 2 coins to flush one side of the espresso machine, then refill it.
As soon as a player has served all five types of drinks, complete the round, then sum the value of your completed drink tiles, with each pair of sugar cubes counting as 1 point. Whoever has the most points wins, with coin serving as a tiebreaker.
• In Koole Klötze (“Cool Blocks”) from Claude Weber and Jacques Zeimet, you need to quickly build sculptures from random bits of wood and hope that others can figure out what you’ve created.
Here’s how to play this 3-6 player game:
The first player takes the first six bits in line, along with the building platform and sunglasses, then shuffles their deck and secretly looks at the bottommost card. They now have 30 seconds to use the wooden bits to recreate the image on the associated construction card, balancing bits as they wish, but not moving them to create an animated scene.
The other players can each play one card face down into the central hexagon to guess which construction card the active player is building. Once time runs out or everyone has guessed, the active player forecasts how many others correctly guessed the answer, then reveals all the cards. Whoever first guessed the correct answer scores 2 points, with the second correct guesser earning 1 point. If at least one person guessed correctly, the builder scores 1 point, and if they forecast correctly, they score a bonus 1 point.
The builder then places all used bits at the end of the line and passes unused bits to the next player clockwise, with that player taking bits from the line as needed to have six on hand.
After everyone has been builder twice (with 5-6 players) or thrice (with 3-4 players), whoever has the most points wins.
• Noch mal! Deluxe from Inka and Markus Brand features the same gameplay as 2016’s Noch mal!, but this version is for 1-4 players (instead of 1-6) and has erasable player boards and a dice tower inside the box bottom.
In terms of what’s new, Noch mal! Deluxe features a co-operative variant played with the same rules in which players need to complete one of the five missions by game’s end, whether color bonuses, completed rows, blocks of four, stars, or the spelling of “NOCHMAL”. The game contains the original solo variant as well as a solo challenge using the new missions.
All four of these titles are due out in Germany in March 2023.
