If you remove the beans from Uwe Rosenberg‘s classic card game Bohnanza, is it still Bohnanza?
The U.S. branch of AMIGO will attempt to answer this question in Q3 2023 with the release of Bohnanza: Dahlias, a special edition of this design with new art by Beth Sobel.
Mock-up copy at GAMA Expo 2023
Bohnanza: Dahlias features the same gameplay as the original German edition of Bohnanza, which is for 3-5 players. As AMIGO’s Alex Yeager explained to me at GAMA Expo 2023, this edition came about after Beth Sobel approached the company with the idea of creating a flower-themed version of the design.
The look of this edition — and the absence of bean-related puns — makes for a more mainstream-friendly product, and Yeager says that they’ve already had interest from garden stores in stocking the game, something that has not happened with ye olde beany Bohananza despite its decades of success. To make the game more approachable for this audience, the company stuck with the three- to five-player version of the game so that players don’t have to adjust the contents of the deck and the rules for how many cards to draw. When it comes to mainstream game acceptance, the fewer exceptions, the better!
Bohnanza: Dahlias will initially be a U.S.-only release, but the German branch of AMIGO will have copies on hand at SPIEL ’23 in October.
Mock-up copy at GAMA Expo 2023
The side of Bohnanza: Dahlias bears a 1 because this will ideally be the first title in a series, although it’s a mystery right now as to whether the series will be non-bean Bohnanza games, Beth Sobel flower games, or something else entirely. I’m sure that AMIGO would appreciate your speculation as to what it should publish…
• Another upcoming title from the U.S. branch of AMIGO is Pick-a-Pepper, an English-language version of Sauscharf, a card game from Wolfgang Kramer and Christian Stöhr that debuted in late 2022.
The enraged/constipated chili sauce on the cover is being replaced by a deranged pepper, but aside from small artistic changes, the game remains the same as its original release. In short, each player starts with a random hand of chili cards, uses them to acquire new chili cards (possibly ditching their old cards along the way), and tries to build sets of cards to acquire chili sauces while ditching all the chili cards in their deck.
I’ve played Sauscharf nine times so far and plan to post an overview soon to share my enthusiasm for the game. AMIGO plans to debut Pick-a-Pepper at Gen Con 2023 in August ahead of a September 2023 retail release.
• Before either of these games hits the market, in June 2023 the U.S. branch of AMIGO will release Linko! (which moved from Ravensburger to AMIGO in 2022), Halli Galli Circus (known elsewhere as Halli Galli Junior0, and Take 5!, which will be sold on its own and no longer packaged with X nimmt! as Take 5 & Take A Number.
Oh, and 2024 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of Take 5!, so Yeager teased a new version of the game for that occasion — yet strangely it seems like only yesterday that I was covering 6 nimmt! 25 Jahre…
