Yesterday we (meaning a group of active Board Game Society members) visited the Tactic head office and factory in Pori. It was an interesting and educational visit; it was nice to see a real board game factory. Too bad it wasn’t running at the time we visited it.

They’ve got a pretty impressive production line there. They can produce games at a speed of 1200 copies per hour. Kimble, the game they’ve been doing for over 30 years, they can make 1800 copies per hour.

The whole business was actually started to produce Kimble. The family got a copy of Trouble in the 60’s from relatives living in the States and they decided to start producing the game. The Finnish version is named, by the way, after Richard Kimble, the main character of The Fugitive. Fugitive is “Takaa-ajettu” in Finnish, that is “Chased-after, which kind of fits the game, I suppose.

One of the cooler bits of the visit was to see their demo game closet. It’s a fairly big closet lined with shelves full of games up to the ceiling (and actually they’ve removed the ceiling to make more room for games). There were many uninteresting games, but also real gems, like Carabande, Ravensburger High Society, old editions of Formula De, stuff like that. I guess you could find some really great games there if you digged through the whole collection, it was quite a mess in that storage room.

We played some games in the minibus, as it was a fairly long trip: Oriente was different and odd, yet actually quite good entertainment. I’d definitely play again, at least with six or seven players. Nicht die Bohne had no control and no fun and Shit! was horrible with six. I won’t be playing the last two games again.