HANS IM GLÜCK, approx £12
DESIGNED BY STEFAN DORRA
2-5 PLAYERS, ABOUT 30 MINUTES
REVIEWED BY STUART DAGGER
Each year the German games industry produces a whole clutch of card games aimed at that half hour slot at the end of a games session. This is another of them. The theme this time is the Olympic games, the ancient variety. (So ancient in this case that they have dated them about 1300 years before the real thing actually started). The cards show athletes, who compete in a set of five events. Each athlete is rated to show his proficiency in each event. In each round a particular event will have been nominated and each player will enter one of their four current athletes for it. The most proficient athlete wins the event and scores the points for the player who entered him. The owner of the athlete who came last then gets to nominate the next event but one to be contested. All players then get a new card to replace the one they have just played. The points for events tend to increase as the game progresses and so the two decisions you have to keep making are (1) do you make a serious bid for the current event or do you try to come last and set up a more favourable one in two rounds time and (2) do you try for the points currently on offer or hold back your best athletes for the later, higher scoring events. It is a neat little idea and a well constructed game, but, as with Res Publica, which was also a neat little idea and a well constructed game, it left me and my group cold. However, as you will see in the letter column, other people are quite enthusiastic. So this looks like another instance of Don Greenwood's dictum about different strokes for different folks.
Stuart Dagger
On to the review of 6 Nimmt! or back to the review of Intrige.