Love it or hate it

So, it's been a while... we haven't been lazy, just so busy working on getting Warriors & Traders to board games enthusiasts and, of course, playing.

As one might guess, we're playing also other games besides Warriors & Traders. We put passion into it, we even fight and, ultimately, we learn and we enjoy.

Last Week I had the chance to play for the very first time 3 new games, all famous and all intriguing. The first and the best one was Sid Meyer's Civilization. 

It started slowly, with a 2 hours setup and with failing to understand what is what. So, we hated it, actually I will only speak for myself, I hated it. It seemed to me that if a game takes more than 180 minutes just to set up the game board, cards, armies and players, it's just too long. After a short break, I started over, this time trying to understand what I am doing. After only 1 hour, we stormed past the setup and started playing. Three hours and two liters of water later, I decided that I love this game. 

Usually board games are more interactive than single player computer games, but the later play much better. There's just more design space when you're not limited by the physical size of a box. I expected the same with Sid Meyer's Civilization, but I was wrong. It is the very first time that a board game plays better than the computer game. For all those looking for a complex strategy game, this is the answer. With the low amount of randomness and the huge amount of options, guided by one of the four possible ways to win, this game offers big space for re-playing and. This reminds me of Warriors & Traders.

I am so enthusiastic about this that I will not even say what are its minuses, very few, but noticeable.

Secondly, I got to play an incomplete game of Britannia. It was, least to say, one of the best war games I've seen. A big Bravo to the team making their way through Britain history and putting it in a box full of surprises. I will not comment more as I did not even get to finish the game (yes, it's long but it's worth your time), but I can say one thing for sure, it does not punish harshly the new player who makes a mistake in the very beginning. Even as a new player, you have a decent chance of winning or, at least, coming close.

Last but not least, I tried out Alien Frontiers. Although I am not a big fan of games with a lot of random, I had fun. We played twice, we spent three hours and we were laughing half of the time. It's not for strategy fans, it's for fun fans.

All three games have one thing in common, they generated strong reactions, some of us loved them and some of us hated them, for various reasons, from length of play, to heavy rule book or fear of loosing. But we all agreed that, whether loving or hating them, these games are from the special "make a difference" category.

This concludes my review for tonight with two promises, we'll write more often about the games we like and  soon we'll bring more news about Warriors & Traders.

Are we actually on the market?

After Essen, many people started asking where can they buy Warriors & Traders - an absolutely legitimate question.

I would translate this question into "Are we actually on the market?" and I will also try to answer it briefly.

The games reached our warehouses exactly one month ago and in the mean time we've been in Essen where more than 200 people bough our game.

What's next? These days we're shipping to the biggest distributors in the United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. It will be a week before our game boxes will reach them and another one or two before Warriors & Traders will be in the stores.

The best estimate is that by the end on November, Warriors & Traders will be available for board game fans all over Europe and US. 

Until then Warriors & Traders is available for buying on the official website.

Going places

First thing I did after Essen was sleep. I slept on the plane back to Romania, I slept a bit on the bus from the airport, and at home I slept a bit more. Then, for the rest of the week, I just went to work and then back home to sleep.

Then on Friday Alex was in town and wanted to play W&T...

We played a 5 player game on the Central Europe map and we had a very nice war in the Balkans. Serbia attacked Bulgaria early in the game and got it down to just one princess. However, in the process they left Vidin empty, and this allowed Romania (who had completed military development by then and was just getting unified with 7 provinces) to attack Serbia in most of their provinces and cut the retreat for some infantry. In the end, Serbia was left with just the capital and one princess and Romania got about 12 victory points in one turn. It turns out double strike is really effective against princesses and small armies.

After that, we played a few rounds of Wings of War, which I got back from Spiel'11.


I have no pictures from the W&T game (light was really bad) but here's one from WoW:

On Saturday, we played again: more WoW and finally I got to try World Without End, a game we had in the group since summer.


Sunday I went to the Red Goblin's lair to demo W&T. We played for a couple of turns and they liked it.

I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the goblins redecorated since my last visit - I find the new layout more comfortable and welcoming than before.

After the demo game, I stayed a bit more and played some D&D. I even got to met a dragon

And finally, today I got to visit Taraba de Jocuri where we played a demo game in which Mihai managed to wipe my country out completely ...

... and concluded the evening in Ceainaria Tabiet where I didn't take any pictures but promise to do so next time. I also noticed they have a copy of Shadows over Camelot in their library, which is on my "to be played" list.

Anybody want to join this weekend?

Cheers,