Heart of Africa - another game from Andreas Steding. I’ve been crossing off the list of his games and I got this one brand new in shrink for cheap. And, woah, this game got to be one of the most original old school Euro games I’ve ever seen. There is no turn order. Yes. No turn order and it’s possible, in theory, to take two turns or more in a row. But that is determined by a one-round auction in a closed economy (similar to Knizia’s Orongo or Dream Factory) and then may do actions based on the two action tiles that are put up for auction for that round. Do some actions and then score pts for holding territories which can change value according to the market track.
But then, you’re like “Then wouldn’t that cascade into a runaway winner problem?”
No. Because all the money that was spent from the auction and throughout the round will be divided into all other players (excluding the active player). Player A will soon run out of momentum (if they haven’t already after their one turn). And have to rest until they can accumulate enough money to compete for the turn’s auction.
Steding - just like in his other games - is pretty good at allowing long-term planning. The auction for the action tiles consist of 4 pairs of action tiles, but you only bid for the top ones. And then bid for the 2nd row next turn and so on. So, players can see 3 turns ahead on how many action pts and which actions they can fight for. A player can play the waiting game know that the actions that they want will show up in 2 turns.
It’s such an interesting game. It has area control combat based on blind bidding. They can try to fight with the bids, but one can bid with a retreat tile and then TAKE the winner’s blind bid. So, will the losing player bid with a retreat or are you gonna bid low so not to give too much. But then, they might think you’ll bid low, which allows them to compete as they have enough money to outbid a low one. Oh, mind games.
But the game felt a bit rough on the edges. I need to play it more. We played with the short game so we didn’t see long term development. But it seems to suffer on runaway loser problem where the player getting dunked on will struggle for a while. But not sure.
The theme is such a big no-no on a games club. It talked of traders moving from the coasts of Africa and expands into the interior. Players can send their traders to met other players’ traders or neutral traders and try to outcompete them. And I’m like “Really!?”. It’s quite clear on what this is. These are armies expanding their colonial empires in Africa, fighting off one another or against the non-player natives.
Phalanx’s production of the game is totally abysmal. Misprint on the tiles. Bad rulebook. And the tracks are just stupid. From top are the low values and down to the bottom with the high values. And so when a tile tells me that I drop down one level on my reputation track, is that a good thing or a bad thing??? Ridiculous.
If Steding decided to redesign this to iron out some bumps and have it without the colonial Africa theme, it would be an insta-buy to me.
Die Macher - I was Grüne, and going against FDP, CDU, and SDP.
We started at Bremen for Round 1 (out of 4). We didn’t do so well mainly because we haven’t figured out how the system works to play properly. But Bremen was the tutorial round for us They aren’t into green policies and SDP and FDP seem to be doing well. But since I control the media in the state, I advanced the issue that is against both of these parties. CDU end up on top by default because we all did badly as a result 
Next was Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Here, the Greens seem to dominate the state. The FDP controlled the media and changed an issue to screwed me over. But I remain the winner of the election. Baden-Württemberg. CDU and SDP started off dominating this arena, but the Greens manage to play catch up and went equal footing with both of them. This was a big blow for all 3 competitors. To SDP’s frustration, FDP decided not to screw me over by publishing the polls, and instead opted for increasing the party base for pts, which allowed me to catch up.
Then the last round was Thuringia. I manage to wrestle away the control of the media from a rival, but the state’s issues don’t mesh really well that we didn’t manage to secure enough votes. Still, the big results on the two big states of Round 3 and 4 was enough to secure myself the win.
The table enjoyed the tension and experience of the game. We felt it was thematic but there’s some thematic hiccups here and there. Like, it’s possible for multiple parties to win over 50 votes. But you need a coalition if no party has no 50+ votes. The constant flip-flopping of issues sounds very much like what politicians would do, but felt like it was TOO constant that it’s a bit unrealistic.
The game set in Germany was real enough to make it feel real, yet foreign enough for us that it wasn’t potentially uncomfortable. But our table wasn’t that type of people who would actually take a game personally in that context of playing pretend politicians on a games night.
There are also some weird things about it. The turn order bidding was degenerate. It was a blind bid with the winner paying money to be first, and then the turn order is clockwise. Lame. Our table started talking about ways to house-rule that next time.
The polls was a bit of a internal contention to me. It generated a thrill of possibly swinging the election, but the almost hidden information and the very swingy nature of it felt a bit too much for me. I mean, sure, Dominant Species is swingy and it is one of my favourite games, I agree with you. But I sincerely felt that Die Macher manage to make itself more swingy in terms of determining the outcome of the election.
But there’s a lot to love about the game, for me. There’s a very very good mix of long term and short term goals. It’s a heavy area control with a lot of tension, and many ways to influence the outcome. There’s trade offs to be had and opportunity-cost questions. It’s just fun deciding if you want to accept (cough) big donations and displease the party’s base or refuse it to increase the party base.
One of the players wanted the game, so I’ll talk to him tomorrow if we can reach an agreement. I’ll stick with the longer but wider game of Dominant Species
At least I won Roll for the Galaxy which I taught him after.