Players: 3-4
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)

The Components

Barbarossa comes in a small little box with the following components:

• 7 board bits
• 1 scoring track
• 13 arrows
• 12 curse tokens
• 4 scoring disks
• 4 jewel cubes
• 4 pawns
• 1 die
• 4 clay bars
• 1 pad of paper
• 1 rulebook

Board Bits & Scoring Track: The "board" comes as 7 separate bits: one "riddle gem" which sits in the middle of the table (and which you place your clay sculptures upon) and 6 event tiles which go around that gem.

The scoring track actually has two tracks on it, one score track proper and one "jewel track".

Each of these pieces is printed on good quality, full-color, linen-textured cardboard. They all feature nice-looking fantasy artwork as well, and are generally an attractive centerpiece for the game without overshadowing the clay sculptures that you're going to create.

Arrows & Curses: Also printed on linen-textured cardstock. The 13 arrows are plain black arrows that mark when a riddle is solved (by stabbing them!). The curse tokens are "interrupts" and are just printed with a lightning bolt. They're both plain but utilitarian.

Wood Bits: Each player gets a pawn to mark his space on the event tiles, a small cylinder to mark his score and a square cube to mark his jewel count. These are all good quality wood bits painted in the four player colors (green, red, yellow, blue).

The wood die is one of those light, wooden dice that appear in various German games. I didn't have any particular problems with bias on this one.

Clay Bars: The clay is described as "high-quality, non-greasy clay ... [that] won't dry out." I don't know much about clay, but it seemed nice enough. It comes in the four player colors too.

The game very helpfully includes a pile of small plastic bags so that you can later store your clay it them.

Pad of Paper: A small, unlined pad of paper. This is another nice addition that didn't have to be in the game, but which makes it better for its inclusion. You use this to pass various answers back and forth to other players (and as the rules suggest, you should have one piece of paper for each opponent).

Rulebook: A four-page full-color glossy rulebook that does a good job of quickly explaining the game. There's also a one-page full-color insert that shows some riddle examples, and also gives you a list of words in case you're stuck when you're modelling.

The theming is worth briefly noting, mainly because it's puzzling. There's dragons and jewels and letter dwarfs making up a fantasy background, but there's never really any attempt to tie the game into the theming. (It was apparently originally developed based upon ideas from a series of fantasy novels, but that origin is even more vestigial in this edition than in previous ones.)

Overall, the components of Barbarossa are all very high quality. They're easy to use, they're attractive, and there is a huge number of them given the very low price point. Putting all this together, Barbarossa earns a top rating of "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Play

The object of Barbarossa is to craft clay model riddles that are neither too easy nor too hard to guess, and more importantly to quickly solve the riddles crafted by other players.

Setup: Each player begins the game by crafting two or three clay objects. These should be simple, concrete objects. If you're stumped, there's a list of sample items in the box, containing items like "binoculars", "igloo", "eyebrow", and "tentacle".

To start off the game each player also marks a starting value of 12 jewels and places their markers on the start space of the scoring track and on the "question mark" event.

Taking a Turn: On your turn you advance your pawn around the events that circle the riddle gem, then take the appropriate action for the event space you land on.

You can roll a die, then advance that number of spaces around the gem. Or, alternatively, you can spend from 1 to 6 jewels to advance that number of spaces.

There are 6 events around the Riddle Gem. They are: dragon (x2), jewel (x2), the letter dwarf, and the question mark.

Dragon. When you land here every other players scores a point. This keeps the game moving even if people get stumped on the riddles.

Jewel. You earn one jewel.

Letter Dwarf. You point to one sculpture and ask its owner to give you one letter from it. You get to designate the letter (e.g., "first", "second", "last"), and he writes it down so that only you see it.

Question Mark. This is the most important event, because it lets you try and solve a riddle. This is broken into two phases.

First is the question phase. You can ask questions about any of the riddles (e.g., "Is it bigger than a breadbox?", "is it organic?"). Whenever you get a "yes" answer you can then ask another question (about any riddle). When you get a "no" answer, you're done. (Possible answers are "yes", "no", "maybe", and "no right answer".) These questions are answered verbally so that everyone can hear the answers.

When you're done with the question phase, you then move on to the solution phase, where you can try and figure out one of the riddles. Your write down what you think it is, show your answer to the sculptor, then he tells you if you're right or wrong.

Using Curses:There's also an out-of-turn action: the curse. Each player starts with three. At any time, except during a player's solution phase, you can throw down a curse. At this point you can immediately ask for a letter or solve a riddle.

Scoring Points: Both the sculptor and the riddle solver score points when a riddle is solved. Each riddle can be answered up to twice, and this is marked by sticking arrows in the riddle, which is a neat, evocative effect. The riddle solver gets 5 points if he solved a riddle first and 3 if he solved it second.

Meanwhile the sculptor might gain or lose points. For the first three answers the sculptor loses 1 or 2 points. For the fifth through ninth answers he gains 1 or 2 points. For the eleventh through thirteenth answer, he loses points again. So, you want to make a riddle that's not too easy and not too hard.

Ending the Game: The game ends either when someone reaches the end of the score track, or else when there have been thirteen answers to riddles.

Relationship to Other Games

Barbarossa has previously been released by Kosmos, and reprinted here in the US by Rio Grande, but it's been unavailable in English for a couple of years. This new version, by Mayfair Games, is a completely new edition. The game has been simplified a bit, with the new event track being smaller and missing one event type (the ghosts, who gave all your opponents 2 points). That really doesn't change the game much. Some of the fantasy theming has been simplified too. Previous editions called the players "wizards" and the jewels "elfstones" and that seems to have largely disappeared. Unfortunately this game supports less players than previous Barbarossas, 3 to 4 instead of 3 to 6, which is a bit of a shame for a party game.

And Barbarossa is a party game with some slight gamers' nuances.You'll find similar creative gaming to Barbarossa in many other party games, from Pictionary to Cranium, the latter of which also involves clay modeling. However you won't find Barbarossa's more strategic elements, such as spending resources (jewels) to avoid a die roll in most other party games.

Barbarossa also distinguishes itself from most creative party games in that it doesn't reward good creative skills; you have to offer up so-so representations, else you're going to be losing points. (Arguably many of the timed creative games, where you have to draw a picture within a set amount of time or faster than your opponent also don't reward the most skilled creators, but they do still put a higher emphasis on skill than Barbarossa does.)

(The only other game that I'm aware of that features this core idea is Cluzzle, which admits to being [heavily] inspired by Barbarossa. Which is a polite way of explaining the derivation.)

The Game Design

Barbarossa does a great job of making me enjoy a genre of game that I usually avoid, the creative party game. Its method of making everyone comfortable, no matter how bad their clay modelling skill is, is pure brilliance. I love being able to work with the clay and not having to worry about how good my model is.

Beyond that, Barbarossa is a lot of fun to play. There's foremost a lot of fun and laughter as players try and figure out the puzzling models. It offers some tactics, thanks to the jewels and the curses, good deduction, as you can figure out both letters and ask questions, and furthermore has good timing, as the dragons ensure that the game comes to an end. Thus, beyond just being a good party game, it's a good implementation of a party game with many more strategic freatures.

Barbarossa does have two flaws in it.

The biggest problem is the "blob" problem. The rules generally encourage you to make not just mediocre sculptures, but ultimately entirely shapeless sculptures. This is mostly due to the fact that there's no penalty if your riddle is never guessed (as opposed to being guessed late).

Second, you can run into problems with words. If you look at my picture at the top of this article you'll see that three of our puzzles were "lemon", "treasure chest", and "woodscrew". In many riddle games, "lemon slice", "chest", and "screw" might have been acceptable alternate answers for these questions, but because you're also getting letters in this game, you can't really accept the alternate answers. To a certain extent, a player is penalizing himself if he chooses too difficult of a word for his sculpture, but it can still be an issue.

Overall I think these problems can be overcome if you're playing with a good will and if you have an explicit "no blobs" rules. But I would have preferred official ways to avoid these issues.

On whole, Barbarossa is a lot of fun, and its a great combination of party & strategic genres. It earns a "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Barbarossa is one of Klaus Teuber's oldest games, and it's now finally back in print in a very inexpensive English edition. This is a clay modeling game that manages to set you at ease because you don't have to be the best modeler and also improves gameplay by including strategic nuances. It's a little kludgy in places, and unfortunately only goes up to four players, but is overall a superior entry into the creative party game market.

In consulting DriveThruRPG we've come up with a number of products which we think might be related, but some might be inaccurate because the name, Barbarossa, is so short. Nonetheless, take a look, as purchasing through the RPGnet Store helps to support RPGnet.