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W. Eric Martin
(W Eric Martin)
United States
Apex
North Carolina - • It's often difficult to provide a hook for abstract strategy games, but designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer and publisher Game Brewer might have found a winner in Amygdala, which the publisher plans to demo at various conventions such as Gen Con 2022 and SPIEL '22 ahead of its release in 2023.
Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:
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Kramer and Kiesling had two domino-laying games published in 2020 — Renature, which I found intriguing, and Jubako, which I liked but didn't play enough to cover — so I'm curious to see what this design does differently.Life is full of emotion, and the region of the brain primarily associated with processing these emotions is the amygdala.
In the abstract strategy game Amygdala, players vie for control of different regions, each associated with an emotion. They must collect and store emotional resources in their memory bank which they will use to unlock emotions from their mind, then place these emotion tiles on the main game board.
Emotion tiles can be connected in networks of like emotions to score points. The player with the most emotions in each region can score big points at the end of the game, but only if they manage to unlock and place a claim tile belonging to the region they wish to score.
• For a different take on theme in an abstract strategy game, let's look at Lass die Kirche im Dorf! ("Leave the Church in the Village!") from Dieter Stein, which German publisher Clemens Gerhards released in 2021.Well, Clemens Gerhards first released this game in 2016. Stein told me that Gerhards was asked to develop a game for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017, and Gerhards in turn invited Stein to design something. The requirements: The game should be called "Lass die Kirche im Dorf!", and it should include a priest figure. The game was originally available exclusively through the evangelical online outlet chrismonshop, but now Gerhards can sell it anywhere. As for how it plays:
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Stein notes that aside from the literal interpretation of the name, "Lass die Kirche im Dorf!" also means "Don't get carried away." He adds, "It's an often used idiom in German".The challenge of Lass die Kirche im Dorf! is to complete your town before the other player does. Don't hesitate to call on the clergyman for help as needed!
To set up on the 7x7 game board, place the clergyman in the central space, then each player places the church steeple and nave of their color in opposite corners of the board, with the ridge of the roof pointed in the direction of their choice. Players then take turns placing their seven houses on the game board; each house must be placed in an empty space that's not orthogonally adjacent to any of your other pieces.
On a turn, move one of your pieces in a straight line in the direction of the roof ridge as many spaces as you wish. You cannot cross over occupied spaces. To end the move, rotate the piece 90º. Alternatively, you can call on the clergyman for help. If a piece's movement is blocked on both sides, whether by the edge of the board or other pieces, you can swap the locations of this piece and the clergyman; to end your turn, rotate the piece 90º.
To win, you must have all of your pieces connected orthogonally; additionally, your steeple must be orthogonally adjacent to your nave. Finally, neither the steeple nor the nave can stand on a perimeter space on the game board. As soon as your pieces have met all of these conditions, you win.
• Rattus, which debuted in 2010 from designers Åse and Henrik Berg and publisher White Goblin Games, was sometimes accused of being an abstract game, but very important parts of the gameplay involve hidden information, so it was not really abstract at all.White Goblin Games is bringing the game back to market in mid-2022 in the form of Rattus: Big Box, which consists of the Rattus base game, the Pied Piper, Africanus, and Academicus expansions, promo role cards such as The Judge, The Jester, and Boccaccio, and previously unpublished materials, modules, and bonus cards, such as the new "Guilds & Inns" and "Bonus" modules.
Z-Man Games has announced an October 2022 release date for the game in English.
Not familiar with Rattus? Here's an overview I wrote in January 2010 following my first game:Quote:
I've now played Rattus a half-dozen times, with the Pied Piper expansion also hitting the table three times, and I recall it being a lot of fun, despite all the death. As you can see in the mock-up image above, the cubes have been replaced by vaguely human-shaped pieces, so...I'm not sure what to think of that.In case you didn't guess from the name and the furry faces on the box cover, Rattus is themed around the Black Death, with player cubes dying off again and again as the plague travels throughout Eurasia.
One face-down rat token starts on each region of the board. On a turn, a player adds one or more cubes to one region, with the upper limit of new arrivals being the number of rats in the area; optionally takes one of the six special characters; optionally uses the powers of any characters they hold; then moves the plague figure to a new region of the board, most likely spreading more rats along the way.
If the plague figure — being the personification of death — stands on a region that contains both rat tokens and player cubes, the rat tokens are revealed one by one. Each rat token has a limit value showing the number of cubes (1-6) that trigger an outbreak and symbols that show who dies in the event of an outbreak. Those symbols are M (meaning the player who has the most cubes), A (meaning all players), and the six symbols that represent the special characters; if you hold the special character shown on the token — or have the most cubes in the event of an M, or exist at all with an A — you lose one cube for each matching symbol. If rats and cubes remain in the same area, you keep revealing rat tokens until one group or the other dies off. Whoever has the most people on board at game's end wins and gets to bury the dead.
Since the rat tokens are placed face-down, you're playing in the Dark Ages for much of the game, running the odds mentally for how many dudes you might potentially lose — but not really knowing because you didn't memorize all the rat tokens prior to the game anyway.
Mock-up image of board and bits in Rattus: Big Box
Rattus presents you with the dilemma of taking characters in order to gain powers while simultaneously setting yourself up for future death. If you have no characters, after all, you die only when facing M or A on the rats. I've played only a single two-player game, and my "awesome" strategy consisted of piling three dudes a turn into a single region while holding only one character. I was gambling on not losing too many guys when that region was ratted at the end of the game, and my opponent let me do it because he had no idea whether that would work either. He beat me by one, but given the turn of the rats either of us could have won.
One game of Rattus played by stupid players doing obvious, semi-random actions means I can't say anything conclusive about the game. I've seen enough people dismiss Qwirkle as an obvious game with no room for strategy or thoughtful plays to know that I should keep my mouth shut at this point, so I will — except to say that I'm charmed by the rules referring to a player's pieces as "cubes", instead of people or tribes or any other such descriptive word. Probably best not to think of the dying oozing pus and blood. Don't think about it, I said!
