With it being the week after Essen, we were bound to be playing some of the new releases with seven of us seeking out that hidden gem. My group of four started with Nations: The Dice Game, a title I was really looking forward to based on my enjoyment of the "full" Nations game. Using your dice, you aim to develop your civilization through progress tiles that give you more powerful dice, as well as improving your knowledge through books, constructing wonders, feeding your people and building up your armies. These all generate victory points with the goal being to have the most victory points after four rounds of play. It is a very streamlined distillation of the game and plays in about an hour with four players. However, it does lose some of the thematic elements of the different nations in the earlier game and the decisions are not as hard. John was unfortunately stymied by an inability to get better dice as everyone else seemed to beat him to them. He was always struggling to play catch-up. Andrew benefitted greatly from keeping ahead on the book track for most of the game. He and Mark K had also wisely invested in dice that helped build the more expensive wonders, something I missed out on. We weren't surprised to find Andrew ending up winning by a pretty comfortable margin.