Wall_Street_Journal - Nexus e.V. Berlin

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PERSONAL JOURNAL --- Board Stiff? These Prize-Winning Games Deliver a Challenge --- The Rules May Be Simple, But Strategies Are Complex; Here Are Our Season's Picks

Berlin -- ON THIS COLD Sunday, 25 people have gathered at a community center to eat brunch -- and play board games. It sounds like a group of lonely pensioners looking for company on a dreary November afternoon, but in fact no one is over 40, and most of the people are in their 20s.

The Nexus game club is a varied group -- engineers, computer specialists, students of German literature and history and even a three-year-old boy with his mom and dad -- that just happens to share this peculiar passion. Except in Germany it's not so peculiar: Among Europeans, Germans are the biggest board-game groupies.

"They make up around a third of our entire world-wide market," says Pierre Gaubil, spokesman for the French-U.S. board game publisher, Days of Wonder. "It's cultural, it's big." The Austrians and Swiss are also big players, he says, followed by the Dutch, French, Italians, British and Spanish.

So what does this group of German board-game fans think makes a game great? "Simple rules, easy to play, an emphasis on strategy and you want to play it over and over," says Timo Lemburg, a 29-year-old systems consultant who helped found the Nexus club 12 years ago. The publishers of board games, who range from small independents to those that sell hundreds of thousands of copies, play a high-stakes game of their own, looking to produce this year's big hit -- and get it on the shelves for the gift-giving season.

Lifelong board-game enthusiast Klaus Eisenack, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, hopes he has a winner in "Keep Cool." Published in November by small game press, Spieltrieb, it was created by Mr. Eisenack and his boss, Gerhard Petschel-Held, over a beer at a local pub. The two men discovered they both had a similar idea for a global-warming game, so they pooled their efforts and turned it into a reality.

"We thought the theme -- the real global-climate game -- was itself a mixture of strategy and chance," says Mr. Eisenack. "Environmental protection costs something and you have to be economically strategic, but there are also a lot of questions about the future."

Players act as countries trying to balance economic ambitions with ecological challenges. Winners can be big polluters or environmentalists -- the key is to protect their own interests. "Keep Cool," is available in German or English directly from the publisher ( www.spiel-keep-cool.de ) for 22.95 euros.

But "Keep Cool" is just one small pawn in the board-game game. Europe's biggest annual trade fair for the game industry, Spiel, in Essen, Germany, in October featured more than 400 new games from exhibitors hailing from 24 countries. If history is a guide, most won't make it out of the box: Only about 10% of all new games ever achieve enough popularity for mass-market production, says Ulrich Blennemann, brand manager at Netherlands-based Phalanx Games.

Phalanx produced one of this year's top hits, called "Maharaja" in English-speaking countries. (It's "Raja" in Germany and "Maharadja" in the Netherlands.) "Maharaja" won this year's Nederlandse Spellenprijs (Netherlands Game Prize) and was nominated for both of Germany's top prizes -- Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year), the most prestigious prize of all, and Deutscher Spiele Preis (German Game Prize), which is awarded at the Essen fair.

The awards are vital to putting a new game on toy-store shelves, says Mr. Gaubil of Days of Wonder, which took the Game of the Year award with its "Ticket to Ride," whose U.S. edition proudly sports the "Spiel des Jahres 2004" symbol on its front cover.

"Once you win the German prize, you're sure to sell over 300,000 copies," says Mr. Gaubil. That's a key level for mass marketing. "Ticket to Ride" also picked up France's top prize, the As d'Or (Golden Ace), awarded at the annual Cannes game fair. (This year's winner of the German Game Prize -- also a nominee for Game of the Year -- was "Saint Petersburg," published by Germany's Hans-im-Gluck Verlag.)

In recent years, prizewinners have reflected a trend toward what Spiel trade-fair organizer Dominique Metzler calls the "intellectually challenging family game." It began around 10 years ago, with the international top-seller "Settlers of Catan," published by Kosmos Verlag. "This trend is so big, people refer to it now as the `German-type game,'" even if the game is designed and produced outside Germany, says Ms. Metzler.

"The games have only a limited element of luck -- tactics are more important," she says. "They are multifaceted -- there are several ways to win, and the rules take some time to understand." They often involve either travel to foreign destinations or building economies and civilizations.

Most of this year's top prize winners and nominees fit into that category. Here's a look at four of them:

'Ticket To Ride'

Written by well-known American game designer Alan R. Moon for two-year-old Days of Wonder, "Ticket to Ride" is a rail-travel game with simple rules. Where the beauty lies is that while rules are simple, players are confronted with strategic choices at every turn. The object of the game is to lay claim to train routes across North America, connecting several cities by rail. To claim a route, players buy colored, plastic train cars to place on the board. The longer the route, the higher the points. Secret-destination cards with extra points and the constant challenge of holding enough cards to pay for routes give this fast-moving game its thrill.

`Maharaja'

Put simply, the goal of "Maharaja" is to build palaces in 16th-century India. But there's nothing simple about it. A classic "German-style" game, it requires first-rate strategists and is best played by multiple players -- up to five. The game board and pieces give some clues to its complexity: seven cities and 30 villages, wooden architect figures, action discs with spinning arrows, glass palaces, 20 wooden houses, governor markers, character cards and 60 gold pieces. Each player assumes the role of an Indian prince, or raja, and competes by building palaces for the king, or maharaja. Rajas travel from city to city seeking help from influential public figures -- architects, builders, traders, craftsmen and even a wandering monk. Each figure gives the Raja a special advantage that helps him raise money for building palaces. The first player to build seven palaces wins.

`Saint Petersburg'

In "Saint Petersburg," basically a card game played on a board, players try build a grand 18th-century city from the ground up -- just as Peter the Great did after founding St. Petersburg in 1703. They have start-up capital of 25 rubles and pick, buy or exchange cards to obtain craftsmen who bring money, aristocrats who bring money and points, and buildings that bring points. The game is played in eight to 10 sets, each made up of four rounds. The aim is to get the most points and to make money to invest in building, which brings more points. Players have to make tough, tactical decisions that can bring bankruptcy or fortune; they can err in building too much, too fast or too little, too slowly. Players' choices are limited by the small number of cards they can hold, so they are constantly forced into tricky decisions, which gives the game its buzz.

`Smugglers' Island'

A roll of the dice and the lighthouse turns, but can the smugglers get by before its beam lands on them? The first smuggler to ferry items worth seven points in his boat from one island to another is the victor. One of three games chosen for this year's Viennese Games Academy Prize for children, this new game from Haba helps develop kids' deductive powers and ability to think ahead. Each player gets a boat docked to an island filled with treasures, each with a different value. The aim is to get the wares to another island without being caught in the lighthouse beam. If the beam falls on the boat, its treasures are dumped into the water -- but another boat can retrieve them. The winner is the first smuggler to rack up seven points .