Klaus Teuber, Deckscape and more

Teuber was a seminal figure in modern gaming.

It’s been one hectic week over here in the Montgomery home — we’re preparing for a baby (our first!), and that, combined with the usual suspects (work and Real Salt Lake) have conspired to leave me having not played as many games as I would have liked in the last few weeks. As a result, rather than going in-depth today, we’re going to talk about some things in games happening right now.

Klaus Teuber

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

We’ll start with some sad news: Klaus Teuber, designer of Catan and several other award-winning games, has passed. The news has spread far and wide, with tributes coming from all corners. While I cannot tribute him as well as so many others (Dan Thurot, over at Space-Biff! had a really lovely post that I can’t recommend enough), I don’t think it’ll come as any surprise that Catan played a vital role in introducing me to the world of modern games. My friend Scott, visiting from Seattle, brought along with him a copy of Catan.

It opened my eyes in a way that no other game had, and the two or three years that followed led me down a path of discovery. It started, I’m sure, with Reddit, then BoardGameGeek, and it’s grown into a position of true prominence in my life. While I might have got to this point without Catan, it’s important to me that I didn’t. Catan was there, guiding me along. I never did buy a copy for myself, but I was gifted a copy of Star Trek Catan that I played numerous times. It extended the game uniquely (at least until the Catan Scenarios: Helpers of Catan expansion was released in English), and the static setup actually proved more interesting than I imagined it would.

Klaus Teuber was the first designer whose name I recognized on a box. I later picked up a copy of Löwenherz (later titled Domaine), which I’ll still pull off the shelf occasionally. Catan was the game that made Teuber a household name, and that, in turn, helped propel an industry. He’ll be missed.

Dipping into Deckscape

One of my readers, Jéssica, recommended the Deckscape series in a recent comment, and we played one (Dracula’s Castle) on Friday with some friends with whom we typically play cooperative games. It paired really well with enchiladas and Exit: The Game — The Professor’s Last Riddle.

I’ll be doing a full breakdown of the most popular escape room-style games at some point over the next few weeks, but I wanted to share some initial thoughts here.

First, I appreciated just how easy it was to jump into the game. When you start a Deckscape game, you just start with the top card in the deck. It’s very simple that way. It perhaps guided us a little more than was necessary, but it was breezy in doing so, and we were able to really get into the game pretty rapidly.

Second, the puzzles ramped up well over the course of the game, starting with some pretty simple ones that introduced us to the mechanical tone of the game. When we solved a puzzle (or failed to do so), the game told us how that puzzle could be solved, and we didn’t have to go to a hint card to figure it out.

Finally, there were several moments where we drew several cards at once. With some games that play with just a deck, it can be difficult to have branching or simultaneously solvable puzzle paths. Deckscape executed well on the latter, giving us opportunities to spread different cards around the group to work toward solutions on different types of puzzles.

I don’t know if I would play a Deckscape game over an Exit game, but I suppose it’s a moot point, given I’ve now played all of the U.S. released Exit games (save two of the games with a jigsaw puzzle), so it’s not as though there’s going to be much choosing most of the time.

Other things of note

• I played UND1C1 with some soccer-loving friends, and it’s the first time I’ve felt like a board game really captured soccer tactics. Interesting stuff!

• We also played Dog Tag Trick, which is a breezy little trick-taking game from Japan with some interesting elements — you’re making two-card sets (pairs, runs, or multiples of 5) or playing to a ‘side trick.’

• I also played Heat: Pedal to the Metal, and yeah, it’s definitely not Flamme Rouge — both for better and for worse, maybe? I don’t know, this one needs more time.

Well, until next week! Thanks for reading, as always. I’ll be looking at some of my favorite crowdfunded games next week, I think. We’ll see!