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  • Gaming Year 2022
  • 1825 notes
  • 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
  • First impressions: Scout

    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…

    November 17, 2022
    More about games

    Cat in the Box, Krass Kariert, Scout
  • Unlock! Game Adventures

    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…

    October 23, 2022
    More about games

    Unlock!, Unlock! Game Adventures
  • Slices of the colour pie

    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.…

    September 2, 2022
    Magic: The Gathering

    Magic: The Gathering
  • Top 100 list, 2022 edition

    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…

    July 30, 2022
    More about games

    Top 100
  • 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…

    July 24, 2022
    Statistical lunacy

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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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