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Lautapelaamaan 2023
Thanks to Covid-19, Lautapelaamaan was last organized in 2019. Now it returned unusually: it was held in February and in Tampere. Like in 2019, the event was held in a mall: the Ratina mall in Tampere had suitable empty space we could use. Thus the Lautapelaamaan was held for the first time outside Helsinki. As…
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One game per BGG page
Michael Debije listed his favourite games, one per BGG page, on BGG: A Curmudgeon chooses one game per page… going deep. A friend made his own list on a forum, prompting me to make mine. It’s simple: browse the BGG ranking list and pick one game from each page. Here’s my list: 1-100: A Feast…
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Gaming Year 2022
Winding down. The number of games I played dropped again. A few years ago, I played over 700–800 games per year with over 350 hours clocked. Now, 384 games and just 227 hours played. The last time I had a year this slow was 2010, and then I had a baby and a toddler. I…
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Drawing tube lines in London
Next Station: London by Matthew Dunstan is another game in the X-and-write genre; in this case, a flip-and-write (I prefer the Finnish catch-all term “coupon-filler”). Each player has a fairly abstract map of London in front of them and must draw four underground lines to generate as many points as possible. The tube lines are…
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Unlock! Legendary Adventures
Another Unlock! box arrived from the library. This one has three adventures loosely themed with legends. Action Story starts with a chase scene where the players must reach a fleeing criminal. The mood takes a swift turn soon. This is the easiest adventure in the box and relatively straightforward to solve, but it’s fun for…
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First impressions: Scout
Japanese Scout was designed by Kei Kajino and published by Oink Games in 2019. It’s a small box card game with a good reputation: it was a nominee for the Spiel des Jahres award in 2022, and several friends have praised it. Since my game group likes tricky card games, I thought Scout might be…
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Unlock! Game Adventures
I was two Unlock! games behind. Fortunately, both of the sets are available in the local library. The first one to arrive was the later one; this one had fewer reservations. Unlock! Game Adventures uses other Asmodee titles as source material. There are scenarios for Ticket to Ride, Mysterium and Pandemic. It’s a pretty good…
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Slices of the colour pie
I was wondering: which are my favourite colours and colour combinations in Magic: The Gathering? Mono-colour decks My favourite mono-colour deck is crystal clear: green. The basic archetype of creature-based aggression works for me, and this is one of my most successful archetypes. It’s fun to play. Mono blue is my least favourite single-colour deck.…
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Top 100 list, 2022 edition
My annual top 100 list is now out on BoardGameGeek: Mikko’s top 100 — 2022 edition. Making this year’s list was a slightly sad process. I have a two-year rule for my list: this year, I’ll consider games that I’ve played in 2022, 2021 or 2020. This meant a list of 146 titles. I’ve last…
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A history of fads
A thought hit me while I was compiling my latest top 100 list. I could take each quarter in my game records and look for the hottest game of that quarter. That would show the fads and the flashes in the pan and be a nice snapshot of my gaming history. For each quarter, I’ve…