TransEuropa will play from two to six players, although I’ve never played with more than four. The entry for TransEuropa on Board Game Geek suggests that the game is best with five or six.

TransEuropa was designed by Franz-Benno Delonge and first published in 2005. The recommended age is eight and older, which is about right, but I think you could go a bit younger with some kids.

TransEuropa plays pretty quickly and the rules are extremely simple, which is exactly why I chose this particular game. Players draw cards from five different regions across Europe. On your turn, you can lay down one or two pieces of track. The board is a map of Europe with major cities connected by a triangular grid. Most of the grid lines are a single line [ - ] but some are double lines [ = ], which represent an area where it is more difficult to lay track.

You start by placing a marker of your color in a particular city and then on your turn you can start building track from that location. Once your track is connected with another player’s track, your network of travel then expands to include all of their track, and they have access to yours as well. A round ends when a player has managed to connect all five of their cities. That player will score no points, but all of the other players will lose points equal to the number of tracks they would have to lay down to connect all of their cities. [ = ] Double track lines count as two tracks when making this determination. Those players then move their locomotive up on the scoring track accordingly.

I also have the expansion Vexation, which I’m pretty sure is now included as part of the base game. The expansion gives each player three special tracks of their color that allow them to make connections that can only be used by them, so if the rail networks are linked other players may only use the combined rails up to the point that they reach a rail of an opposing player’s color. No particular intersection of the grid can have more than two colored rails adjoining it, which prevents a player from being locked out of a region. We almost always play with this expansion, but I think it’s important to teach the game without it, especially when playing with younger children.

TransEuropa is actually a re-implemented version of TransAmerica, which is the same game but is played on a map of the United States. TransAmerica was first published in 2001, and was a Spiel des Jahres Nominee in 2002.

You can check out a terrific video about these games created by Scott Nicholson over at Board Games with Scott. Yay Scott!

Disclaimer: I have recieved no review copies of this game. I have included links to funagain.com, an online retailer that I support by including affiliate links to games. If you purchase something from Funagain, and include my affiliate code, P2RX, then I get a few pennies of store credit so I can buy more games.

I don’t know how many of you get to go to gaming conventions like BGGCon, KublaCon, or any of the Stategicon events, but those of you who do go know how tiring it can be to play games hour after hour until early in the morning. You want to make the most of your time while you’re there, right? Who wants to do something lame like sleeping, when you can play another game of Galaxy Trucker? What’s a dedicated gamer to do? Energy drinks!

I decided to try a few of the more popular energy drinks and write down my thoughts on taste and such, because I’m just that kind of a guy.

I tried the 16oz. Red Bull even though I had already had that before. Red Bull tastes like chemicals to me now. It does give me a boost, but it certainly did not give me wings. In fact, I think I crashed harder after drinking this one more than any of the others. I’ve heard that this tastes much better if you add alcohol to it, but that seems a little silly to me, like storing matches next to the gasoline.

The 16oz. Rockstar is my energy drink of choice. It looks like bad pee if you pour it into a glass, so just drink it out of the can. You really don’t want to look at this while you’re drinking it. I really like the taste of this stuff. I don’t really know how to describe it. It tastes like how I imagine an electrified cactus would taste. A couple months after having one of these, I was driving back from a day at the coast and got rerouted because of the wildfires. It added three hours on to my trip home, and Rockstar kept me very alert until I got home at 3:00 AM.

I tried both the regular and lo-carb versions of the cool looking 16 oz. Monster energy drinks. I wanted to like this one because it’s looks scary and there are tons of ads for it all over the Vegas monorail, which makes it somehow cool to me. Unfortunately, it totally sucks. Both versions, like some of the others, look like pee if you pour them in a clear glass, but this looks like pee from someone who has some serious problems. The regular Monster had this really unpleasant taste that made the inside of my mouth feel icky. It gave me a huge energy boost, but it wasn’t a good energy. It made me all shaky and gave me a horrible headache. The lo-carb version didn’t give me any of the jitteryness or headache, but it tasted so damn-awful horrible, I couldn’t finish it.

I tried a 16 oz. can of Amp, which tasted very light in comparison to the others. It had a pleasant citrus flavor and a nice color. It gave me a good amount of energy, but it made me extremely jittery and irritable. I was seriously ready to rip someone’s head off because they were taking forever to take their turn. It’s too bad, because it tasted pretty good, but I don’t think an energy drink defense would stand up in court if I injure someone who takes too long to make decisions in Thurn and Taxis.

The 16 oz. NOS energy drink tasted sort of like a super caffinated version of a Cactus Cooler, which is one of my favorite soft drinks of all time. It looked like some radioactive liquid right out of a Simpson’s episode. It gave me a fair amount of energy, but I didn’t finish the whole thing. It just got old after a while. I would certainly choose this one over all of the rest, with the exception of the Rockstar.

There are a bunch of other brands out there. I may try some more as time passes and let you know what I think. If you have any favorites, and would like to share your thoughts, I would love to hear what you think.

GAME ON!!! with EXTREME energy!!!!!

In the game, each player takes on the role of a recycling company, trying to clean up the city. There are four types of items that can be collected: paper, plastic, aluminum, and glass. There are four corresponding recycling plants where you can deposit your collected items and pick up more. If you are the player that contributes an item or items that equals a total of four or more, then you get to pick up a scoring token from that particular recycling plant. The scoring tokens are stacked in values from zero to five, using less tokens if you have fewer players. There is a negative value token in the middle of each stack that creates a wonderful speed bump in the game where players try to avoid that recycling plant; however, at the end of the game, you must have at least two tokens from any particular recycling plant in order for them to count, so if the negative token is the only one you have from that particular plant, it doesn’t count in your final score.

The game is really all about hand management, which is made difficult by this cycle of depositing and picking up new trash. Every time you place an item from your hand to a particular recycling pile, you have to take all of the trash available. The trash is then refilled with a number of cards equal to one more than the number of recycled items currently in the pile. This wouldn’t be a big deal, but you have a hand size limit. Your truck can only hold so much, right? If you go over your hand size limit, then you have to discard down to a legal hand size. You have to go and dump your trash illegally. At the end of the game, you suffer a penalty in points for every item you have to dump. The game ends when a player removes the final scoring token from one of the four recycling plants.

R-Eco is published by Z-MAN Games and retails for around $15 at your friendly local game store, or you can find it for a bit less from a trusted online retailer like Funagain.com.

It’s worth mentioning that I first learned about R-Eco by listening to Garrett’s Games and Geekiness, a weekly gaming podcast produced by my friend Doug Garrett. If you are not already a regular listener, you should check it out. I highly recommend it. You can visit garrettsgames.com or you can do what I do and just subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Disclaimer: I have recieved no review copies of this game. I have included links to funagain.com, an online retailer that I support by including affiliate links to games. If you purchase something from Funagain, and include my affiliate code, P2RX, then I get a few pennies of store credit so I can buy more games.

Now, I will tell you up front that I am not a fan of Monopoly. I think it’s about one-tenth as fun as it is long. I won’t play it with you ever, unless I really really love you or I owe you money or something. I just don’t care for the game.

The Monopoly Deal Card Game is not Monopoly, but rather a Monopoly flavored set collection game that will play from 2 – 5 players in about 15 – 20 minutes, ages 8 and up. In the game, the first player to collect three complete sets of property cards is the winner. The properties are the same familiar ones from the Monopoly board, so if you have Park Place and Boardwalk, you have a complete set.

The rules are pretty simple.

• You shuffle the cards and deal five to each player.
• At the start of your turn you draw two cards, or if you happened play all of your cards on your previous turn, you get to draw five.
• During your turn you may play up to three cards. There are essentially three types of cards:
• Property Cards – When you play a property card in front of you, then you own that property. You don’t have to buy it. It’s just yours. There are property cards that are wild and may be used to complete more than one type of set. These wild cards can be moved around freely on your turn.
• Action Cards – These cards allow you to do things like charge your opponents rent on a property that you have in front of you, steal or trade properties, build houses or motels, draw additional cards, or require that your opponents give you money because it’s your birthday. Really.
• Money Cards – These cards are played in front of you and act as the money you have in your bank. This is an important concept in this game, because you can never pay someone with money from your hand. It must come from the cards you have in front of you. Almost all cards can be banked as money, even action cards, but once they are banked as money, they can never be used as anything else.
• If you are forced to pay rent and you do not have any money banked, then you have to pay your opponent by giving them an appropriate amount of your collected property cards, which they get to lay down and add to their own properties. This is why it’s important to keep money in your bank.
• Once someone collects three complete sets of properties, the game is over.

This is seriously a great little game for the money. You can play it just about anywhere, and you can teach someone the game in just a few minutes. It’s Monopoly, but it’s fun!

You should be able to find this just about anywhere. I got my copy at Target for under $6. Go buy it. Play it. You will like it. Grandma will like it. Your kids will like it.

Now pay me rent for Baltic Avenue.

The following games -

• Diamonds Club, designed by Rudiger Dorn
• Einauge sei wachsam!, by designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling
• Maori, designed by Gunter Burkhardt
• Valdora, designed by Michael Schact
• Zack & Pack, designed by Bernd Eisenstein

are all games that I have not had the pleasure of playing, so I don’t have much to say about them. I’ve heard good things about Diamonds Club and Valdora, and I would love to get a chance to play those. I haven’t heard anything about the other three. I have to assume that they don’t suck; otherwise, they would not be on the list.

Three of the games on the recommended list this year are games I play fairly often. I will list them in order of total awesomeness.

Mow is a wonderful little card game where you place cow cards from your hand to a central herd. Each cow has a numeric value from one to sixteen, and the cows may only be placed to the right or left of the current herd according to their value, so if there is a seven cow and a ten cow currently on the table, you must play six or less or eleven or more repectively. If you do not have a cow that can be played, then you must take the entire herd into your scoring pile. What is actually scored are the number of flies on each cow. Some cows are happy and have no flies, while some have as many as five flies. The game continues in rounds until someone has accumulated 100 flies and the person with the fewest flies wins. There are also some special cows that can stand on top of other cows (acrobatic cows) and cows that can slide into spaces in the herd (slow poke cows). When you play a special cow, you can also change the direction of play, which makes for some great gotcha! moments.

This is a fabulous filler game that has been a favorite with everyone I’ve shared it with in the last few months. The artwork is hilarious. The mechanics are simple. Gameplay is quick and easy. I wish we could sit down and play right now!

In Cities, players lay tiles that represent sections of one of four international cities: Berlin, New York, London or Paris. As you place the tiles, you may also place tourist markers (meeples) that will score victory points once your city has been completed. Each player will be placing a tile with the same characteristic regions, even though the resulting cities and tourists will be arranged very differently. Each tile can have up to four regions: parks, attractions, water features, and cafes. Once all the tiles are placed, each city is scored according to the placement of the tourist markers. At the most basic level of play, markers score by being placed on adjacent areas of parks and attractions. A more complex level, my favorite, also scores tourists in cafes depending on how much water they get to look out upon. There’s still another level of play that’s too complex in my opinon, so I don’t bother with it, but the fact that this game has a variety of levels of play is certainly one of the things that makes it worthy to be on the SdJ recommended list.

Special thanks to Doug Garrett of the Garrett’s Games and Geekiness podcast for introducing me to Cities. I got my own copy soon after, and have played it with friends and family regularly.

Each player has a hand of cards that they must place one at a time in turn into one of three different cauldrons: red, purple, or blue. The cards have values of 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7. If you place a card into a cauldron that makes the total value of cards exceed 13, then you must take those cards into your scoring stack, leaving the card you placed that made the total go over 13 in the cauldron. This is another game where the player with the smallest number of cards in their scoring stack wins. You may ignore a particular color if you end the game with the most of that color, but it’s important to keep track or it’s easy to get burned. You can also place bottles of poison into the cauldrons that are worth two cards in final scoring.

Poison was rethemed into Baker’s Dozen by the publisher, so if you have a problem with potions, poisons, and cauldrons, you can play with donuts. I don’t imagine the gameplay is any different, but it might go over better with great-aunt Beatrice at the family reunion.

So that’s it for another Speil des Jahres. Next week, once the winners are announced, I will let you know what was chosen and how I felt about it.

Happy gaming!

In Käseklau!, you take turns trying to help Max the Mouse grab as much cheese as he can from any of the five rooms in the house before Camilla the Cat nabs him and he loses all he collected that turn. The cat and mouse markers move around the house randomly as directed by the dice. If the cat and mouse end up in the same room, your cheese snatching days are over.

The game is very similar in theme to Viva Topo, which is another favorite around here, but it is much easier to set up a game of Käseklau!. All you have to do is set out the five room tiles, stack an equal amount of cheese tiles in those rooms, and you are ready to go steal some cheese.

Another game that was a big hit during the holidays was Tier auf Tier or Animal Upon Animal, a stacking game where you try and be the first person to get rid of all of your animals by stacking them on top of an alligator before they topple over.

I’m not saying it’s not a great game. It is a wonderful game. I’m just saying that your kids will like this one so much it may drive you a little crazy, and you may have to hide the box on a very high shelf for a month or so.

Both of these games are produced by Haba, and are available from Funagain Games. If you do happen to order anything from Funagain that you see here on this website, or even stuff that you don’t, be sure and use my affiliate code as a reference, P2RX, and I will get a little credit so I can buy even more games! Yippeee!