Gameblog

Tom Lehmann

Before, Tom Lehmann simply didn’t register on my radar. I’m too young or something for the TimJim Games and Fast Food Franchise to mean anything to me. However, now I take a look at my list of three most-anticipated games — Caylus Magna Carta, Race for the Galaxy and Phoenicia — and hey, two out of three are Lehmann’s games.

I was completely unaware of Phoenicia until I read the designer preview at Boardgame News. After that, I was hooked. It sounds brilliant! I liked many bits of Das Zepter von Zavandor, but after playing once, I found the game lacking in many respects. Based on Lehmann’s preview, he’s went and fixed all the bits about Outpost (of which Zavandor is a rehash) I found lacking, excessive length and the clunky currency system being the two most important bits.

What comes to theme, I quite like Outpost’s robot factories and whatnot, but very much prefer Phoenicia’s ancient civilization theme (especially with the focus being somewhere else than military might) to Zavandor’s bland high fantasy. I’ve browsed through the rules and expect to enjoy Phoenicia a lot. Must buy, it seems…

Mikko

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4 responses to “Tom Lehmann”

  1. Yeah, I think Phoenicia is going to be a must buy for me, as well. I need to get onto JKLM Online and give it a try before it comes out just to confirm.
    I’m really glad Rio Grande came to a distribution deal with JKLM. There have been a few games out of JKLM that I’ve been interested in, and until now they’ve been hard to get. If I’d had to gice Phoenicia a pass because of it, it would have been a real shame.

  2. Thanks for the nice words about Caylus Magna Carta, although that’s not the topic of my comment 🙂
    I have had the chance to meet Tom at the Gathering last month, and I played both Phoenicia and Race for the Galaxy there. For some reason I haven’t appreciated my only play of Phoenicia as much as I thought I would — I haven’t played Outpost, but enjoy Zavandor quite a lot, and Phoenicia seems to fix several of its problems. Maybe I just didn’t like losing the game that badly, and I will like it better once I play it again — which I will definitely do.
    As for Race for the Galaxy, it is definitely the best game I have played in 2007 so far (even though I have lost badly most of the time).
    And Tom is a very, very nice person, too.

  3. The Rio Grande distribution deal is a boon, getting JKLM Games would be hard otherwise. I hope it also means stricter quality control, as the graphic design of JKLMgGames has been pretty horrible so far.
    William, the difference between us is the fact I don’t enjoy Zavandor quite a lot =) The one time I played, we ended up having a rather long-winded discussion on how it should be improved (which was fun, so in the end it wasn’t that bad) — Tom seems to have dealt with most of the issues we had.