On Dec. 7, 2016, Restoration Games announced the first three titles that have been buffed up for gamers both nostalgic and new, with these titles scheduled to debut at Gen Con 2017. The highlight, at least in my eyes, is a new version of Robert Doyle's Stop Thief, first released by Parker Brothers in 1979 when I was eleven years old, a tween in spirit if not in actuality since the word didn't exist at that time.
The gist of the game is that you are all detectives who must catch a thief, but initially you know of the thief's presence only through the sounds emitted by an included electronic device. You hear alarms go off, glass breaking, footsteps across the floor: boop, boop, boop. You roll dice to move across the game board to try to catch sight of the thief, which is determined by you indicating your location in the device and the device giving you some kind of feedback. If you catch the thief, who will keep robbing as long as possible, you collect a reward; be the first to collect enough money and you win.
I ran into Daviau playtesting the updated version of Stop Thief at BGG.CON 2016, and he showed off some features of the app that they're using in place of the electronic device. This version of the game will include new modes of play, variable suspect effects, and individual movement decks to replace the dice that you used to curse when you failed to catch the thief over and over again due to poor rolls. Yes, poor rolls — that's my excuse.
When a game designer discovers a solid game system, they tend to rework it again and again to deliver twists on a familiar design or to create something better based on what they've learned. Wolfgang Kramer's Tempo— his first published design in 1974 — is one such example. In that game, players were presented with six colored columns and a matching pawn at the base of each column; players also had a hand of cards, with each card showing some of the colors and a number or symbol by each color. During the game, a player would play a card and advance all of the pawns that matched the colors on that card by the indicated number of spaces. Before play started, however, players placed secret bets on which colors they thought would reach the top of the columns first, and players won money based on how well those bets paid off.
Hardly anyone knows Tempo given that the game is more than forty years old and, shall we say, less than aesthetically appealing, but Kramer has reworked this system multiple times, starting with the release of Niki Lauda's Formel 1 in 1980. Yes, a game that used racing as a mechanism wisely became a game themed around racing. More importantly players now bid for ownership of the cars that would participate in the race. No longer were you simply moving a pawn; you became a race car driver and put your own money at stake to express confidence in how you'd do. What's more, thanks to the evolution of the game board from six separate tracks to a race track that narrowed and widened, players could use their movement points to choke out others from moving, thereby wasting movement for a race car that had ended up in someone else's hands. Good stuff! Formel 1 Nürburgring, Daytona 500, Top Race, and Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix are all evolutions of that card-based racing system.
Restoration Games' version of the system — Downforce, a racing term that indicates a vehicle's negative lift, i.e., the force pushing it onto the ground to create better traction — has been created by Daviau going through all of the different variants over the years to create what the press release dubs "the most fun version possible". Players are also promised "component quality befitting its pedigree".
The final game in Restoration's intro trilogy is game #2 in the BGG database: G. W. D'Arcey's Dragonmaster, a trick-taking card game from 1981in which the dealer each round would declare what the contract was for that particular hand, e.g., "Dragonlords" in which you wanted to take no Dragonlords cards or "First and Last" in which you were penalized for taking those two tricks. Five different contracts existed in the game, and once you chose a contract as dealer, you couldn't choose it again when next you dealt.
Dragonmaster was based on the French game Barbu from the 1930s, and the new version titled Indulgence will be a game of "papal intrigue" set during the Italian Renaissance with twenty different contracts being included.
