Gameblog

  • About
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  • Gaming Year 2022
  • 1825 notes
  • SpellBook

    SpellBook

    SpellBook by Phil Walker-Harding and Space Cowboys. I received a review copy from Asmodee Nordics. Elevator pitch: SpellBook is a race of collecting magical resources, using them to unlock spells and then using those spells to unlock more spells. What’s in the box? There’s a bunch of spell cards and a familiar board for each…

    September 19, 2023
    Reviews

    review, SpellBook
  • Top 100 list, the 2023 edition

    I did another edition of my Top 100 list. This was the first list with the new BGG GeekList sorting system, where I can assign a rank for each item and have BGG rank them in descending order. That’s very nice for these top 100 lists. The number of comments the list received has been…

    August 21, 2023
    Statistical lunacy

  • Xiangqi, Shogi, Riichi and Brass: Birmingham

    Here are some random notes on games I’ve played recently. Xiangqi and Shogi. Thanks to a book project, I’ve returned to Chinese and Japanese chess. I tried both about 15 years ago, but those were just single attempts. Now I’ve delved slightly deeper, thanks to a son who is keen to explore these games with…

    August 10, 2023
    More about games, Uncategorized

  • Earth and Space Base

    I’m usually not interested in new games, but apparently, I can be persuaded. Something in Earth attracted me; I’m not sure what it was. I checked the rule book, which seemed complicated at first sight, and then went and learnt the game. It’s not that tricky, really. It’s a game of many cards, tableau building…

    June 29, 2023
    More about games

    Earth, Space Base
  • Texas Showdown with Seas of Strife rules

    Texas Showdown is a very good trick-taking game for five or six players. The point is to avoid taking tricks. The main twist in the game is the suit-following rules: you have to follow suit, but if you can’t, you play anything, and other players can then follow your suit. The trick is won by…

    June 1, 2023
    More about games

    Texas Showdown
  • Lautapelaamaan 2023

    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…

    February 8, 2023
    Less about games

    Akropolis, Blue Moon City, Fiasco, Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Lautapelaamaan, Monikers, Paleo, So Clover!
  • 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…

    January 31, 2023
    Less about games

  • 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…

    January 2, 2023
    Statistical lunacy

  • Drawing tube lines in London

    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…

    December 10, 2022
    More about games

    Next Station: London
  • Unlock! Legendary Adventures

    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…

    December 8, 2022
    More about games

    Unlock!, Unlock! Legendary Adventures
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Rating scale

Here’s the rating scale I use, and how it corresponds to BGG ratings:

  • Enthusiastic: I love the game and want to play it. (9, 10)
  • Suggest: Good game, I want to play it and will usually suggest it. (7, 8)
  • Indifferent: I’ll play the game, if necessary, but won’t suggest it. (5, 6)
  • Avoid: I don’t want to play this game. (1-4)

(Thanks to Brian Bankler)


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Of green

The green colour of the sidebar is the Brunswick Green used by Nationalised British Railways – Western Region:

“A different color, also called “Brunswick green”, was the colour for passenger locomotives of the Grouping and then the nationalized British Railways. There were three shades of these colours and they are defined under British Standard BS381C – 225, BS381C – 226, and BS381C – 227 (ordered from lightest to darkest). The Brunswick Green used by the Nationalised British Railways – Western Region for passenger Locomotives was BS381C – 227 (rgb(30:62:46)). RAL6005 is a close substitute to BS381C – 227. A characteristic of these colours was the ease for various railway locations to mix them by using whole pots of primary colours – hence the ability to get reasonably consistent colours with manual mixing half a century and more ago.”

Wikipedia: Shades of green


There is a difference from play with dice, because the latter is open, whereas play with cards takes place from ambush, because they are concealed.

– Girolamo Cardano: Liber de ludo aleae (1564), translated by Sydney Gould as The Book on Games of Chance (Princeton University, 1953)

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