BGTG 53b - Mar 6, 2006 - All About La Città (with Jonathan Degann, part 2)
Here's part two of the podcast, the one where Jonathan and I get into La Città in detail. By the way, be sure to check out Eric Burgess' podcast Boardgame Babylon, which also features periodic episodes where he covers a single game in depth. In fact, he calls them his In Depth features. He's already done Caylus as a solo show, and recently did Ra with a second person.
La Città is one of the heavier or lengthier games I enjoy, and as such it's sort of a crossover hit between Jonathan and I. Though a little hard to track down now in English, it's supposed to be available for play-by-web on Spielbyweb.com before too long, and the original German edition is still for sale from overseas mail order houses like Adam Spielt, Playme.de, and so on. (Which reminds me . . . is there still any interest in a show about placing overseas orders? I learned to do that with Jonathan, as it were.)
After recording the podcast, I re-discovered a website that looks to be a personal site of the designer, Gerd Fenchel. It's got some very interesting material about the history of the game, including photographs, starting from a 6-hour prototype in 1992 that was set on Alpha Centauri! Later it was rethemed to ancient Greece before settling on Italian city-states in the renaissance. The designer credits the development team of TM Spiele (affiliated with Kosmos and including Klaus Teuber, as I understand) with tightening and shortening the game up. That development process is something I'm very curious about and am looking for opportunites to explore in a later podcast.
I'm trying to get the sense of what's being said on the web page by piping through an online translator . . . with all of the inaccuracies in language that method produces. I wonder if we could get someone to produce an english language translation of those pages? Oh, be sure to check out the photo-journal of this famous cities in Tuscany (the link called "Reise").
-Mark
Links
La Città
Designer Gerd Fenchel's home page
The Google-translated page about the history of the game's development
posted by Mark Johnson at 4:23 PM
5 Comments:
>> (Which reminds me . . . is there still any interest in a show about placing overseas orders? I learned to do that with Jonathan, as it were.)
Indeed there is interest.
I, too, would be interested in a show, even if it is a short one, on ordering from Germany.
In terms of managing the surplus of food over people the method I was taught was that for each surplus food I have take a person counter and lay it down in front of you. Then when you need to place people you take them from this pool. If there are people still in your pool then you have excess food, if you have to go to the bag to get people then that means you're heading for some starvation.
Very nice episode(s)! Enjoyed hearing from Jonathan and to learn more about him. Also, was not too aware of La Cittá, so I'll have to look into it. It sounds quite nice!
I really enjoy these all about shows, Mark. I'm going to have to try La Cittá now that I've heard about it, but you were correct in saying it's not easy to find. Eventually I'll find a gamer who has it.
Also, your guests continue to be top knotch. What a great bunch of gamers you've been able to associate with!
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