From: Peter Card Subject: Essen '96 Here I am back in Old Blighty after 5 days "helping" the SFC Press stand at Spiel'96 in Essen, and spending significant amounts of dosh on a variety of boardgames. We were mostly concerned with the non-consim games, but in off-shifts I accumulated a box full of wargames, and another box of fluffy/family/german/strategy games. Having said that, one of the bigger new games at Essen was Serenissima from Euro-Games, which is a trading/conquest games with _really_ nice bits. The players each start with a major Mediterranean trading city, (Venice, Istanbul, Genoa and, um, Marseilles) 2 plastic galleys and a load of sailors (blue cubes). You can fill your galleys with up to 5 cubes, a mixture of sailors and cargo ( in a variety of colours ) With 2 sailors, a galley can move two sea areas, and so on, and they also act as die roll modifiers in combat. With no sailors, your galley sinks! You earn money by delivering cargo to neutral ports, and even more money for enemy ports, but you eventually earn major victory points by owning ports with full warehouses. The money can be spent on more sailors, more ships, and fortifications. Certain combinations of cargo are required to build the different things at a port. There is creative tension between the requirement to bankroll your empire, and the need to fill up your own warehouses. Serenissima occupies the grey area between a consim and a family game, somewhat more fluffy than Axis & Allies, but also considerably quicker to play - around 90 minutes in my limited experience (once). Due to stupidity, I now possess the English rules translation, courtesy of Mike "Sumo" Siggins' Rules Bank, but not the game. Duh! This situation will be rectified in the near future. The bits are beautiful, but fiddly, with some fragile flagpole thingies used to carry the various powers' emblems on galleys and ports, and as the English translation editorialises, "FOR GOD'S SAKE BE CAREFUL!" The consim end of the games fair was quite extensive, with a number of traders including MiH, (Fields of Glory went into my box), and Columbia, although Warhammer and Battletech was more the order of the day. I also picked up a couple of Azure Wish games. Rossiya 1917, is their Russian Civil War game, and La Revolution Francais is a multiplayer political/military game of the French Revolution, a bit like Republic of Rome. Unfortunately, but logically (it was a German games fair after all), the second game came only with German rules. This may take a while to translate with my trusty pocket dictionary. :-( Peter