Barbarossa

From: Kosmos Designer: Klaus Teuber List Price: $35 ($24 street) Players: 3-6 Playing Time: 60 minutes  Type of game: Family Skill level: 9 Complexity: 3  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 26, Summer 2001

As with Trivial Pursuit before it, the wild success of Pictionary spawned a wave of imitators. In 1988, one of them was the very first published design of Klaus Teuber, who would go on to create Settlers of Catan, and it earned him his first Spiel des Jahres award. Thirteen years later, Rio Grande has published an English edition of that game, Barbarossa, which expands the maximum number of players from four to six.

Each player molds his blob of clay into two objects, each representing a one-word noun. The rest of the game is spent trying to identify the words represented by other players’ objects. Besides simple observation, players have two avenues for obtaining clues. Each is triggered by landing on the appropriate space on the circular game board.

The first option lets a player ask an opponent to privately reveal a letter in the word of one of that opponent’s objects. The second option allows a round of yes/no questions about an object. The questions continue until one of them yields an answer of “no.” At that point, the questioner can initiate a second round of questions, stopping at any time to make a free guess at any object. As soon as he gets a second “no” answer, however, his turn ends.

Guesses are written and shown privately to the sculptor. On a correct guess, the sculptor pierces his object with a plastic arrow. Once an object has two arrows, it’s out of play and can no longer be guessed. The first correct guess earns five points; the second earns only three.

But the brilliant bit that makes the game work is that correct guesses also earn points for the sculptor. Objects guessed early or not at all earn the sculptor a penalty, with objects guessed in the middle of the pack earning the largest bonus. This discourages obscurity and excessive abstraction in sculptures, but nudges players away from completely obvious objects (which wouldn’t be any fun). To this end, I recommend playing with the rule from the first edition (inexplicably omitted here) which imposes a five point penalty for each sculpture with no arrows and a two point penalty for sculptures with one.

To keep players on their toes everyone has three “power cubes”, each of which can be turned in to interrupt play and guess at an object. Players are wise, therefore, to phrase their questions in such a way as to provide themselves with useful information while revealing little to opponents.

A list of possible objects is included, and that’s great for people who blank on their own ideas. The real fun, however, is in coming up with and crafting your own concept. My personal favorite was a large sphere with two smaller spheres attached, looking a lot like Mickey Mouse. In fact it represented an extreme close-up of a hydrogen atom and two oxygen atoms; the word was WATER.

The central activity of the game is tremendous fun, but it’s not well served by the roll-a-die-and-move-around-the-board framework which only interrupts the fun of the Q&A. A minor quibble for a great crossover game in which sculpting is merely the starting point; a game more about wordplay and logical reasoning than artistic ability.