Jubilant chaos, 3D construction or pure deduction: there was something for everyone at the Paris is playful festival. Discover our three favorite games of the weekend, already available for sale.
Competitive athletes
“Competitive Athletes” (Iello) is a game of goose reinvented with a good dose of chaos and eccentricity.
Iello
Roll a die. Move your pawn forward as many squares as the value of the die. Does this mean anything to you? This is quite normal, it is a classic board game seen and reviewed again and again. It is also the basis, accessible to all, of Competitive Athletes, which is however unlike anything else. Visually first, with Angela Kirkwood’s garish illustrations. But also thanks to a truly brilliant idea: 36 different characters to “play as”, each endowed with a more or less crazy power which will explode the rules of the race… Tripping your opponents, blocking them, copying their movements or teleporting them, the possibilities are endless, and the interactions unpredictable.
More than a game, Competing Athletes is a generator of chaos, a machine for creating gigantic laughs, provided you adhere to the proposal, which is necessarily divisive (we don’t control much, apart from the choice of characters), and there are at least five around the table, to maximize the twists and turns.
Competitive athletes
By Richard Garfield and Takeshi Ishida, Iello, €27 | From 6 years old, 2-6 players
Beautiful View
In “Bella Vista”, a creation by the great Bruno Cathala, you will build a three-dimensional city while respecting constraints, to try to become the best architect.
Studio H
Bella Vista is first and foremost the story of an intersection. A perfect marriage between two mechanics rarely associated. On the one hand, a placement game where the traditional tiles are replaced by very pretty three-dimensional buildings. On the other, an auction game, where each player decides to bet a more or less large sum of victory points to be guaranteed to play first and not have the spaces they want stolen. In fact, the more the game progresses, the more the available spaces become smaller. And to make matters worse, you will have to both try to be the first to complete contracts, keep an eye on the end-of-game score conditions and respect the construction constraints imposed by the town hall.
Spectacular on the table with its 3D city which is built little by little, Bella Vista is also a very competitive game, accessible, certainly, which requires advanced thinking and a sense of anticipation. Fans of storage and space optimization, welcome to Bella Vista, you will have work to do!
Beautiful View
By Bruno Cathala and Andrea Mainini, Studio H, €37 | From 8 years old, 2-4 players
Got Five !
“Got Five!” », it’s a deduction game reduced to its simplest device, for a formidably effective and addictive mechanic.
Charlie & Billie
Year after year, Yoann Levet establishes himself as one of the French masters of the game of deduction. After Turing Machine, Temple Code and the formidable Kronologic trilogy, he is back with Got Five!, a distillation of logic to the essentials in playful form. No theme here, no flirtations, just colored tiles numbered from 1 to 60 and ultra-simple rules: five tiles of different colors are placed in front of you in ascending order, so that only your opponents can see them. On your turn, you must ask them for a clue to identify them, either by placing another tile in the correct place among yours, or by comparing two tiles. A table summarizing all the values and colors allows you to move forward with your deduction. The first to have identified their 5 tiles wins the game. We will have warned you!
Got Five !
By Yoann Levet. Blue Orange, €23 | From 8 years old, 2-4 players
