The transition from Koblenz into Koln is pretty dramatic – it became clear that we were leaving the hills and forest of southern / central Germany and heading into more flatlands with occasional rolling hills.  Our one destination in Koln was the famous Dom Cathedral, an impressive structure that dominates the landscape of the city.

The Dom is a major tourist attraction, and the crowds were the largest we had yet seen in Germany.  The inside is dramatic, with impressive stained glass and unbelievably tall ceilings.

We opted to climb the bell tower to get a sense for how tall the cathedral really was, as well as to get some needed exercise.  Along the way we passed the immense bells and large groups of tourists returning down the spiral stairs.  The stairs are actually in three discrete sections with two of them offering extremely narrow passage.

The view from the top made the climb worthwhile.  This is a good time to reflect on just how amazing the weather was for the trip: most days were clear, 60s to low 70s, and we barely noticed any precipitation for the entire 12 days of our trip.  This is as unusual in Germany in October as it is in Portland.

Our touring complete, we climbed in the car and completed the final drive into Essen to check into the Hotel Arosa.  It was a tad bittersweet, but everyone was ready to be done driving around and welcomed the chance to stay in the same room for several days.  Plus we had the Spiel fair to look forward to.  I’ll wrap up my Germany posts over the next few days with some detailed Essen reporting.

While we knew that day 5 would end in Koblenz, we weren’t sure until the day before what route we would take to get there.  We thought seriously about heading to the Mosel valley to visit Burg Eltz and some of the other sights along the way.  But missing the chance to drive up the most scenic portion of the Rhine valley was too much to risk, so we set off for the valley to see some castles.

One problem: the day was Monday, and most castles appear to be closed on Monday.  This meant that our day consisted of driving from one castle to the next and getting some nice photos from the outside. 

This made the boys a bit anxious (and disappointed) so we made sure to treat them with some solid playground time.

While navigating, Julie read ahead to see what other options we had to try and see something on Monday.  Castle Marksburg seemed a likely bet given the prominence of the castle as a tourist destination.  One problem: the castle is on the other side of the river, so this meant getting all the way to Koblenz, crossing the river, then doubling back to the south for a bit.  There was still the risk of the castle being closed, so we found our hotel and checked in around 4pm and kindly asked the friendly front desk clerk to see if the castle was open and till what time.  We brought our luggage to the room then checked back with him – the castle was open!  But it was going to close at 5pm!  Quick kids, jump in the car so we can storm the castle…

Turns out the castle was open until 6pm, but the final tour started at 5pm.  We made it in plenty of time and joined a German language tour.  This was Julie’s favorite castle as it has the distinction of being one of the few (the only?)castles in the area to have not been sacked at some point, so it lacked the baroque or neo-classical treatments so common in the other castles that were rebuilt in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The castle is situated on a hill overlooking the Rhine and offers spectacular views.

Monday night we did a walking tour of Koblenz and enjoyed the peaceful riverfront.  Situated at the junction of the Rhine and the Mosel rivers is the Deutsches Eck with an imposing statue of Kaiser Wilhelm.  We all enjoyed climbing to the top of the statue base and watching the sunset over the Mosel.

We finished the evening with a nice Italian dinner in an open air plaza.  Jacob also got in a brief blogging session with the BlackBerry.

The next day would conclude the touring portion of our trip as we finish at Essen.  But not before a brief stop in Koln…

The old part of Heidelberg is striking – an old ruined castle looms over a beautiful German village.  We were fortunate enough to have a hotel room in the Parkhotel Atlantic, which is located above the castle with amazing views of the city.

This room was substantially better than our room in Tubingen but was identically priced (about 140 euro for the night, including breakfast).  It was nice to have some space to move around, though with a shared bed one of the boys opted to sleep on the floor each night.  The boys caught up on homework and did a bit of blogging the first night we arrived.  We stayed close to the hotel for dinner, dining at the Wolfsbrunnen restaurant.  This was our finest dining of the trip but was still very affordable. 

The next day (Sunday) was spent hiking around Heidelberg.  The castle is more impressive from far away than it is from the inside – it was all a bit touristy.  The one exception was the apothecary museum, which is first rate and very educational with detailed descriptions in English.

The city itself was a pleasure to stroll through, with many historical buildings and the famous bridge spanning the river Neckar.  The highlight was the Holy Ghost Church, and a climb to the top of the tower is highly recommended.

Next up is a drive up the Rhine valley to the lovely town of Koblenz.

Day 3 begin with our departure from Tubingen and a drive back north toward Heidelberg.  We planned for two stops along the way – Ludwigsburg Palace and the monastery at Maulbronn.

After some small challenges parking (we started by trying to drive straight through the palace gate, but the guard would have none of that and sent us over to park below the department store) we entered the palace grounds by about 10:30am.  Note that this is a palace, not a castle.  Think estate, mansion, playground with the mistress.  The grounds were huge, and we only sampled a small part of it.  The best comparison I can think of is Versailles, but not quite as baroque.

(Note: that’s not our rental car in the picture above)

We took the English tour which was well worthwhile, and really the only way to see the interesting parts inside the palace.  The guide was German-speaking but French, and her English was more than adequate for the tour.  The back story is the most interesting part of the tour.

We of course had to check out the game section of the department store; while not quite as impressive as the game store I saw in Frankfurt earlier this year, it still went way beyond what you see anywhere in America but the niche hobby game stores. 

Next up was the drive to Maulbronn on the way to Heidelberg.

Julie and I greatly enjoyed the visit to the cloister; the boys were less impressed.  I think Julie and I preferred the more subdued architectural lines and stark nature of the monastery, while the boys prefer the gaudiness of the palace.

The name Maulbronn actually means “mule fountain”, and the town is famous for the legend of its founding:

Where the Eselsbrunnen ("mule fountain") stands today is where the mule was reputed to have stopped and quenched its thirst at a stream. The monks saw this as a sign from God and it was there that they decided to build the monastery.

To this very day, the legend lives on in the name of the town (Maulbronn literally meaning "mule fountain"), the coat of arms of the town and the etching of the mule drinking from the water in the arched vault of the fountain house.

We finished the day with the drive to Heidelberg, which will be the subject of my next post.

If I’m already this far behind on Germany / Essen posts, it won’t hurt to insert a post with some weekend gaming.  Plus, three of these games are Essen releases that many of you are probably interested in.

Saturday and Sunday were spent assembling another batch of Havoc releases – we are in a pretty good rhythm and should finish the rest of the product by next weekend.  Saturday evening we took a break, left Matthew in charge of Jacob and Brandon, and headed for nearby Newberg to visit our friend George’s new digs at a house-warming party.  George is a gamer, so of course we brought games.  And Havoc.

First up was the new Railroad Dice 2 game from Wassertal, a remake of the original game that is apparently quite different (I never played it).  I tried this once at Essen, but the game was aborted as we played it so horribly wrong that, well, we weren’t even playing the game.  The main objective is to build connections from your home station to each of the other stations, and transport passengers from remote stations back to your own.  This earns “money” (the same tokens are used to track passengers and income).

In my aborted game, we didn’t realize that all connections had to be direct and couldn’t pass through other stations.  This made the process of reaching all the stations rather simple and anti-climatic.  Anyway, we appeared to play correctly this time around and I found the game to be solid and enjoyable.  Space is very tight and the economic system of buying locomotives, connecting towns, using complex dice, and transporting passengers made the game feel like a very light weight and streamlined Age of Steam.  Our main complaint – replacing a simple die with a complex die when it is in the middle of a cluster.  We are thinking of using a pencil with gum on the end of it next game.

Next up was a large group game of Liars Dice, one of my favorite light party games.  We played with a Perudo set and Newberg rules.  Ask me about them sometime.

This game was a load of laughs – I held strong for a long time but lost some dice quickly and ended up in bad shape for a final showdown with Mike (3 dice to 1).  This is a near impossible situation to be in and he pulled out the victory.

Julie, KC, Rita, Ken, and I then drove back to Sherwood.  All of us but Julie were still up for one more game, so we pulled out the Essen hit Shear Panic.  I sort of missed out on buying this game – Peter Loop asked me to buy a copy for him at Essen, but they had sold out before the show and only had pre-orders left.  I was lucky enough to snag a copy from Tom (who lucked into his copies as well) but unfortunately this copy needs to go to Peter.  I say unfortunately because this is a pretty nifty little game.

I didn’t know what to expect, though I had an inkling after playing Leapfrog at a work lunchtime event with Eric.  The game oozes them – how can you not love these little sheeps?  The game passes through several phases where you try and maneuver your two sheep into a position to score the most point. The most important scoring round is the last one, when the sheep are being lined up to be shorn.  You don’t want to be near the front of the flock at this point.  Witness my yellow sheep in the photo.

Players have a card of actions they can take throughout the game that allow them to change the configuration of the flock.  Sometimes the flock gets segregated (as in the photo above), forcing a regrouping of the sheep according to certain rules.  This is not a light game, though it needs to be taken lightly. I really wish I had picked up my own copy, but with KC, Eric, and Peter (and Mike?) owning copies I guess I’ll be able to play it enough.

Sunday afternoon after finishing assembly, KC, Rita, Ken, and I sat down to try the much hyped Caylus, another Essen release.  You can learn about the mechanics in a review at the ‘geek – I’ll just share some first impressions here.

At first we all had the impression that this is an excellent game. Sometimes you just get that feeling – the mechanics work well together, things just make sense.  We all struggled with our choices, experimented with different (mostly unsuccessful) tactics, and made huge mistakes (well, everyone but Ken I think).

As we hit the mid game, I started to feel a little less enamored, mostly because Ken was far out in the lead and appeared unstoppable.  This is more a result of how the rest of us played the game, I think, then a flaw of the game itself.  There were no luck dice rolls, no arbitrary reasons why he jumped out.  He focused on getting building ownership early on, while the rest of us were probably a bit too preoccupied with the castle.  This provided a strong annuity in prestige for Ken that he carried to victory.

Money is very tight in the game and must be watched carefully – I was reminded of both St. Petersburg and Oltremare in that regard.  I made very similar mistakes in my first play of those two games and I suspect I’ll play much better the second time around in Caylus.

I really do hope this game is as good as everyone is claiming it to be, but I’ll reserve judgment for a bit.  I’m sure it will come out again this coming weekend.

Our second day in Germany began with a serious over-sleep – we didn’t get out of bed until at least 9:45am.  This meant we missed our free breakfast but the sleep was probably worth it – I think Julie and I each fell back asleep around 5am or so after waking up at 1am.  We stopped at a small bakery on our way to Burg Hohenzollern near the small town Hechingen.  This was the boys’ first experience with “bees in the bakery”.  Didn’t appear to affect the croissants very much.

Burg Hohenzollern is very striking as you approach it – a majestic castle on the peak of a hill just to the southeast of town.  There was a low cloud layer that morning, almost fog, making the image all that more imposing.

We parked our little Audi wagon down at the tourist parking and began the trek up the hill to the castle.  This was a lesson we would learn throughout our trip – you earn your visits to the castles!  This was a serious climb up, though the less adventurous can take a shuttle bus from the lot.  The work payed off as it gave a true sense of how dominant this castle and the hill upon which it resides really is.

We joined a guided tour of the inside of the castle, seeing some very interesting sites and rooms.  The castle as it is now was rebuilt in the late 19th century, though there are parts that persist from the 15th century.  They recently opened an underground tour of some passages discovered just in the past few years – this was the highlight for us.

Given the lateness of our start that day, we had very limited time after the castle tour.  Our guide book mentioned remains of a Roman villa on the outskirts of Hechingen, which was on our way back to Tubingen.  Finding the villa turned out to be beyond our intuitive navigation skills; after several trips through the city (the construction detours always threw us off) we found a city map / tourist info station and finally discovered the correct route – the villa was on the western side of the town.

If Hohenzollern was 4 stars out of 5, I would give the villa two stars.  There were some interesting elements, but it was a low budget affair and was really in need of some English descriptions.  They are in the process of completing several renovations that look promising.  One of the highlights was seeing a Roman style set of toilets.

There was also an interesting statute garden, but it wasn’t obvious what was genuine and what was just a replica.

We stayed in Hechingen for dinner that evening after visiting a very cool toy store (great game selection, but no special deals worth mentioning).  We had a much easier time finding our hotel the second time around, avoiding a repeat of our 30 minute European Vacation style circling of our hotel without ever finding it.

Next up: the Ludwigsburg Palace and the monastery at Maulbronn.

Our flight from Portland to Frankfurt was uneventful and everyone managed to get at least a few hours of sleep. We picked up our huge luggage stash in Frankfurt – 6 bags in all, some weighing in the 70–80 pound range and hauled it over to the Budget car rental office.  I reserved about the biggest car I could short of getting a minivan – an Audi Estate wagon – knowing we would have so much to carry around.  Why so much?  We were carrying 200+ copies of Havoc with us for Essen!

Our first day of travel would be our longest, about 200km drive down to Tübingen.  The autobahn made travel go by quickly as I was able to average about 120–140km per hour, well below the speed of some of the large Mercedes flying by at 200kph or faster.  We were hungry for lunch so turned off into Sinsheim, a cute little town not far from Stuttgart.  Here we found a nice bistro with a helpful waiter and ordered some bratwursts and drinks.  This was also the first chance for Julie and the boys to converse in German.

Sinsheim was a nice little town in which to stroll and people watch, so we were in no rush to get back on the road.  We indulged in some gelato and shopped a bit, of course checking out the game selection in one of the small department stores (Zug um Zug Europe seems to be very popular). We arrived in Tübingen around 5:00pm and proceeded to search for our hotel, the Katharina.  Tübingen is not the easiest town to navigate, but fortunately there were helpful signs directing us to our hotel up on the hill above town.  The room was small but adequate and about what I expected from a European hotel.  Tubingen has a famous gothic-renaissance town hall.

By 6pm we were ready to drive back downtown to meet with Chris Marquardt, the host of the popular Tips from the Top Floor podcast.  TftTF is an outstanding show about digital photography – if you are trying to improve your skills and knowledge about shooting and post-processing, make sure you check out his show.

We had some great conversation and Chris introduced us to some delicious Swabian food and, of course, German beer.

Having traveled overseas quite a bit, I know that the first night away is usually the toughest.  The boys managed reasonably well, but Julie and I both woke up around 1–2am and had a very hard time sleeping after that.  This would be the pattern for both of us for the next few nights, but we still seemed to get enough sleep each night to be functional.  Amazing how adaptive kids are.

Next up: Burg Hohenzollern and a Roman villa in Hechingen.

Sorry for no posts while we are in Germany.  I took tons of photos but had a terrible time (or, in some cases, I was just too cheap) getting internet access.  Expect a number of posts over the next 1-2 weeks with more details on the trip, Essen, and more.

Last Saturday was a very meaningful day for me and a number of my closest friends.  You see, HAVOC: The Hundred Years War from Sunriver Games made the final turn from concept into reality as we completed assembly of the first 400+ copies of the game. Julie, the boys, and I head for Frankfurt tomorrow for about a week of touring and another week of Essen Spiel.  We couldn’t have cut things much more closely.

For the past two weeks Julie has been hard at work assembly our boxes, which were produced by LithoFlex aka The Box Co-op.  These guys aren’t really in the business of producing game boxes, but we were impressed by their quality and wanted a box that was something like the Great Dalmuti box that you may remember.  One challenge was the insert that holds the cards in three separate sections in the box – the little dividers don’t like to stay folded tightly, causing the insert to bridge out of the box a bit.  Julie solved the problem with a little bit of glue on the inside of the insert.  Here you can see Julie removing the clothes pins from the inserts after a round of drying 60 of the inserts.

Julie managed to get over 600 of the boxes prepared before the cards or rules arrived, putting us in good shape for an assembly party that we held on Saturday.  KC, Rita, and Jenna arrived early afternoon on Saturday to get started while Julie and I watched Jacob’s afternoon football game.  By around 3:30pm we were in full production swing, with Jenna and Julie assembling the boxes with the three decks of cards (from Carta Mundi USA), the scoring token insert, and the rules.

After a bit, our “friends of Sunriver Games” started arriving. Mike and Matthew helped out with assembly while Jenna took over the sorting of our cool bonus cards (more on that later).

Shortly thereafter, Doug and Mimi assumed assembly duties.

Ken Rude showed exceptional mastery of the impulse sealer, which we used to seal the 6”x11” shrink wrap bags.  We purchased the shrink wrap equipment from Plastic Bags for You – they had a great deal on a starter set that included enough bags of the right size for us to do around 500 copies.  This package originally showed up on my doorstep a week ahead of time, but the impulse sealer didn’t work (no heat!) and I had to convince them to send me a replacement ASAP without returning the defective unit.  They had GREAT customer service and got the unit out that Monday; unfortunately train delayed the UPS shipment and it didn’t arrive until 4:55pm on Friday.  The cards arrived the Wednesday before that, the rules on Friday morning.  Talk about just-in-time delivery…

After sealing the bags, I was the master of the heat gun (and I’ve got the second degree burn on my under-arm to prove it) and applied the final touches to shrink wrap the boxes.  Jacob and Jenna were my two main “feeders” throughout the day.

At 3:34pm on Saturday, we finished our 1st box of Havoc, which of course went to designer KC.

At about 7pm we stopped production for the night, with our original batch of 440 games boxed and about 100 left to shrink-wrap (shrink is the bottleneck).  It was of course time for a celebratory toast…

And a team photo in our t-shirts.

Here’s the final product.  We are very proud of the game – the production values surpassed our expectations and we hope other gamers agree that this is a first-rate production.  It plays pretty well too.

So what’s the deal with the extra cards?  We are offering a mini-expansion with all purchases made at Essen!  This expansion adds a nice little twist to the game, making it a bit more chaotic but in a fun way.

Make sure you follow my posts over at the Gathering of Engineers site – I’ll be doing a detailed financial analysis of the game in a few weeks.

Just noticed this on the news.