Board game club met last Sunday and I got to play many interesting games, including few new games I hadn’t experienced before. My number one priority was testing Goldland which I have wanted to try for the last two times — I’ve always run out of time.

This time that would happen, I thought, and ushered the first four people to enter to play it with me. I got to play, and loved it! I’m a huge fan of Kramer’s games and Goldland is no different. It’s basically an optimization problem, but it has a good sense of exploration in it and is less computational than, say, Tikal. I almost won the game, too. I was definitely in the lead, I got to the temple first and put up some pressure for other players. On the last turn, however, I lost eight points worth of adventures to other players and that made me fall down to the third position. Still, it was very entertaining game which surprised me in it’s speed — even slower players played their turns very quickly quite soon.

Another game I was interested to try (again) was Falling. I like the concept and with three players it was better. I need to try it with four or five players to see if it improves still. It was a confusing mess, really, but what a funny mess it was. Real time games is a concept I find terribly intriguing.

The second new game I played was Mississippi Queen with the Black Rose expansion. I had heard lots of good about it and it turned out to be a fairly entertaining game. I came last, but at least I had great time controlling the Black Rose (even though I couldn’t do much harm with it). Definitely a game I’m willing to play again.

One more note: I introduced Vom Kap bis Kairo to few of my fellow gamers, but they didn’t like it too much. I agree it appears, perhaps, a bit confusing when played for the first time, especially if one is unfamiliar with the concept of auction game, but after few landscapes people generally grasped the game. Still, it didn’t impress them much. I like it a lot, I’ve grown to really enjoy it.

So, that’s about it this time. Next time I’m going to probably arrange a session of Die Macher — after all, our next meeting day (16.3.) is also the Finnish parlament election day.