Nominees 2024

Dear All,

at SPIEL we already started looking around for interesting titles for the 2024 Europe Masters event. But there are so many games and publishers out there, we certainly missed some gems.

Feel free to share any interesting titles, suitable for the EC, with us. These could be games you have spotted in Essen or other new releases of this year. We will use it as input for our nomination list.

From all the candidates these games made it to our list of nominees for the 2024 European championship (alphabetical order):

Nominee List 2024

The games on the list of nominees are games that we have shortlisted as very suitable tournament games for the European Championship.

Cascadia – AEG / Flatout Games
Comet – Funtails
Kutná Hora: The City of Silver – CGE Czech Games Edition
Port Royal – The Dice Game – Pegasus Spiele
Rats of Wistar – Cranio Creations
Terraforming Mars: Dice Game – FryxGames
The White Castle – Devir Games

Tournament Games 2024

These four games were taken from the Nominee list and will be played at the European Championship.

Cascadia – AEG / Flatout Games
Kutná Hora: The City of Silver – CGE Czech Games Edition
Port Royal – The Dice Game – Pegasus Spiele
The White Castle – Devir Games

Disclaimer: Please note that the final selection of the tournament games is not based on single titles. We have to take into account total overall playing time, different gaming mechanisms, etc, etc. So we opt for a best possible mix.

Games from the Nominee list 2024

Author: Randy Flynn	CASCADIA CASCADIA™ is a gorgeous spatial puzzle game for the whole family! Take a journey to the Pacific Northwest as you compete to create the most harmonious ecosystem in Cascadia! Cascadia is the second Flatout Games CoLab game – like its predecessor, Calico, it is a puzzly, hex-based tile-laying game with interwoven puzzle elements. Turns are simple – select a tile/token set and place each into your expanding ecosystem. Earn points by fulfilling wildlife goals and creating the largest habitat corridors. With variable scoring goals, each game of Cascadia brings a new spatial puzzle to your table! In Cascadia™, players compete to create the most diverse Pacific Northwest environment as they draft Habitat Tiles and Wildlife Tokens to construct a beautiful landscape mosaic. Each game of Cascadia™ features unique combinations of scoring objectives linked to each of the five wildlife species. While arranging wildlife into point scoring patterns, players will also be competing to create the largest contiguous habitat corridors. As players build out their environments they must pay careful attention to the habitats they create and the wildlife they populate, with the goal of creating the most harmonious ecosystem in Cascadia™.
Author: Peter Prinz	COMET Look up! Comet is coming – and you should prepare to be blown away! Comet is a competitive engine builder without combat with a unique resource concept. In the distant past, you try to save various animal species from an impending comet impact. Choose wisely, because the rescued animals will support your further rescue maneuvers in various ways. Change the past! Comet offers you the unique opportunity to travel millions of years into the past! Skillfully combine card abilities to save animals from the ominous comet with the help of your saviors. Animals you’ve already rescued will join you and use their abilities to help you on your next rescue missions. You want smooth gameplay without sacrificing variety or strategic depth? You want exciting interaction on the game board but without combat? Then Comet is the right game for you! Comet is quickly explained and played. Nevertheless, even frequent players will navigate through the combinations of card mechanics differently in each game to get the most rescue points. Asymmetric hero cards Different types of cards deepen the strategic decisions. Skillfully use your hero card’s ability and combine it with the abilities of the animals you save during the game. On a hero card you will find a special ability that can determine the focus of your actions during the game. For example, some heroes give you particularly efficient movement actions, while others give you access to better hand cards. You’ll also find an individual way to generate rescue points on your hero card. Some heroes give you rescue points for rescued cards of a certain type (silver cards, for example), for the specified color of the eggs of your rescued animals, or for a specific area on the animal cards. Interesting savior movement on the board Think carefully where you place your saviors because your opponents can jump over your tokens to get to the safe cavern faster! It would be much better if you could take advantage of the other players’ saviors instead, right? To move, you use the two areas shown on your played animal card. You can extend your movement range with wild symbols. But always remember that you must discard the used cards after the movement action! Some utility cards, animal abilities, and hero abilities can additionally affect your movement efficiency. Some abilities even allow you to place the giant tortoise and mammoth tokens on the board to skip the areas occupied by these tokens during your movement action. However, other players may also skip these neutral tokens! So think carefully about where you place them. Fast and strategic In Comet, you can expect quick turns and a high level of interaction on the game board. The basic mechanics and rules of the game are quickly learned. With Comet, frequent players get an entertaining game that offers depth. But beginners can handle Comet intuitively as well and enjoy an entertaining game experience. Each game presents a new challenge, as you must skillfully adapt to your opponent’s actions in order to win. When the last silver card is drawn, the comet phase is initiated. Only the player who drew the last card and thus initiated the comet phase is allowed to rest completely, i.e., to refill their hand up to their card limit and to ready all exhausted animals. All others may either refill their hand up to the card limit or ready their animals one last time. From now on, the “Rest” action can no longer be performed and you try to save a few more animals before you run out of options!
Authors: Ondřej Bystroň Petr Čáslava Pavel Jarosch	KUTNÁ HORA: THE CITY OF SILVER Short Description Master the intricacies of a dynamic supply and demand economy as you mine silver, expand guild influences, and build a historic Czech city and beautiful Gothic cathedral. Will you successfully balance personal goals with ensuring the prosperity and growth of the city? Or will you struggle to carve out a family legacy that will live on through the history books Detailed Overview Join other ambitious guild leaders in mining and developing the famous City of Silver during its period of rapid economic growth and expansion in the 14th century — from the first discovery of silver near the cistercian monastery to the construction of Kutná Hora, which quickly became one of the most important cities in central Europe. Kutná Hora is a historical city building euro game for 2–4 players that features a real-life supply and demand experience where every action you take has an impact on the game’s dynamic economic systems. In each round, players take turns selecting actions from a hand of double-sided cards to engage strategic plans like mining, purchasing plots of land to build on, gaining permits, raising buildings for their affiliated guilds, gaining profit from their production, and of course working towards the construction of Saint Barbara’s Cathedral. The asymmetrical nature of each player’s available guilds makes for highly interactive rounds where each decision impacts the economy and other players in interesting ways as they expand their mines and build infrastructure across a shared board. Mine ore and smelt it into a fortune of silver for expanding this beautiful historic city, but take care to balance your personal goal advancement with the need to further the city’s growth. Everything is connected, and sometimes the path to personal victory relies on the prosperity of the many.
Author: Alexander Pfister	PORT ROYALE – THE DICE GAME The Caribbean classic with pirate flair is back! The harbor of Port Royal is as lively as ever and players need to find more sailors, as quickly as possible. Across distant islands they will recruit helpful crew members and loot treasure. A pair of dice will toss them into unpredictable situations, and the more they risk, the further they can travel across their own map. In Port Royal – The Dice Game, players exchange their cards for dice and pencils but the goal remains the same: hire the most capable crew and seek your fortunes across the open sea. They travel to nearby islands to hire new crew members and gain their valuable skills, but when they push their luck too far they might meet Davey Jones’ locker! Each round in Port Royal – The Dice Game has two phases: first, the active player rolls the dice and the game board fills with different colored ship and ship wheel tokens. The more tokens you can place, the better, and you can roll the dice as many times as you like. But if the same ship appears twice and can’t be fended off with the help of your saber-rattling crew, it is a dark day indeed—the player rolling the dice ends their turn empty-handed while the others at the table can fill their pockets. If the active player manages to stop in time, they can exchange tokens for actions on their own game board, gaining a bonus either to reach new islands or to gain first access to new effects. Who will manage to sail away from the other players?
Authors: Danilo Sabi Simone Luciani	RATS OF WISTAR In Rats of Wistar you play the role of one of the four rats who organized the escape from a lab. As such, you will guide your family to prove that you are the most deserving to lead the entire colony. In this strategy game, you will try to plan carefully the actions you perform. In fact, you must select your actions on a wheel that rotates every round, changing its available bonuses. You will explore the Farm and interact with many elements, while developing your player board to unlock special abilities; you will also try to create a collection of inventions, choosing them from a deck of 180 unique cards. Rats of Wistar is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology.
Authors: Jacob Fryxelius Daniel Fryxelius	TERRAFORMING MARS: DICE GAME We have finally built colonies on Mars, but now we face an even bigger challenge: to bring the planet to life and make a new home for humanity! Will your corporation lead the way? Based on the best-selling strategy game Terraforming Mars, TM: Dice Game combines 60 custom dice with 159 unique cards to offer a fast-paced and easy-to-learn experience for families and gamers alike…
Authors: Isra C. Shei S.	THE WHITE CASTLE The heron flies over the Himeji sky while the Daimio, from the top of the castle, watches his servants move. Gardeners tend the pond where the koi carp live, warriors stand guard on the walls, and courtiers crowd the gates, pining for an audience that brings them closer to the innermost circles of the court. When night falls, the lanterns are lit and the workers return to their clan. In The White Castle, players control one of these clans and want to score more points than the rest. To do so, they must amass influence in the court, manage resources boldly, and place their workers in the right place at the right time. All of the action takes place in the most imposing fortress in modern Japan: Himeji Castle, where the banner of the Sakai clan flies under the orders of Daimio Sakai Tadakiyo. The White Castle is a Eurogame in which players use resource management, worker placement, and dice placement to carry out actions. During the game, over three rounds players send members of their clan to tend the gardens, defend the castle, or progress up the social ladder of the nobility. At the end of the match, these activities award players points in a variety of ways. The central panel shows Himeji Castle in all its splendor, divided into several zones. The largest is inside the castle, with the Room of the Thousand Carpets, where the courtiers must ascend socially until they reach the circle closest to the Daimio to enjoy his favor. There is also the pond and the gardens, patiently tended by the gardeners where everyone can relax and contemplate its beauty without restriction. Another important area is the wall and the outside of the castle, where the warriors patrol and stand guard. Finally, we find the area of the three bridges, where the three types of dice that can be used to carry out actions are accumulated, and the personal domain of each player, where they will keep track of their resources and where they will have a reserve of workers.