St. Petersburg is available on Brettspielwelt. It was predictable: it’s such an obvious BSW game.

I played my first game today, just to try it out. There’s no English version yet, but that’s hardly necessary as only the card names are different. The interface is fairly good, though it was hard to notice whose turn it was. Anyway, I got it sorted out during the first game. I thought I wouldn’t win, because one of the players made the worst mistake one can do: he took only one worker on the first round. He lost the game, that was obvious. Had it been face-to-face game, I wouldn’t had let him do a mistake that grave, no way.

Unfortunately, too, I wasn’t the one to benefit from the mistake. I thought that player would win the game, but turned out he wasn’t that good either. Probably newbie… He was eventually third. I had a nice little competition with the other guy. He got slightly better income, but I played my cards well and finally secured my victory with a larger array of aristocrats. He had only played once and I believe he didn’t quite know the significance of aristocrats.

I thought it would’ve been a short game — I estimated at most 20 minutes (after all, it’s a 45 minute game with all the shuffling of money and points). I was so wrong. The game took 53 bloody minutes! I was furious. I consider myself very polite and good-tempered guy, but slow players annoy me and players that slow just plain piss me off. How can someone take more than two seconds to click pass after he’s already once passed? Grr. Paying attention shouldn’t be that hard.

Of course, when you play online, you never know who the other players are. Maybe they have a broken arm or some other handicap or have to take care of a baby (that has happened before) — who knows? Still, it was super-annoying. Hopefully my further StP (old Diplomacy acronyms are surprisingly useful!) games will be faster at the BSW. I’m aiming for 50 games of StP this year!

(Source: Gameblogger)