I’m finally starting to figure out Brass. I’ve won the last two online games I’ve played at the Order of the Hammer and Thursday I managed a second place in a local game. The guy who won was one of the better players in our group, so I can be satisfied with that result.

Of course, getting second place in this game was made much easier by Hannu, who started the game by developing shipyards and while he did build shipyards in both eras, his rail era was pretty abysmal. He had a seriously bad hand of cards and didn’t help it with his play. Still, he scored a fairly respectable amount of points.

I do like this game, a lot. I raised my rating up one point to nine, now that I’ve played about 25 games. Enthusiastic.

After Brass we played two games of Frank’s Zoo. An old classic, and one of the better games for five to seven players. Oh boy did I suck in this one… We played two games, that is six or seven rounds, and I was either dead last or second to last in just about every round. Miserable. Suggest.

I snapped some photos, of course, and now with the new camera (Olympus OM-D). I’m so selling my Canon DSLR. Here are Hannu and Tuomo:

I’m very happy how these black and white portraits turned out. Game photos usually work better in colour, because part of their charm is the colourful boards and bits – if anything, I tend to push up the colours a bit to make them really pop – but portraits are good in black and white. These are almost automatic black-and-white conversions, with only small adjustments in Lightroom.

That Brass photo – 1/8 s shutter speed, hand-held. Another reason why I like the OM-D.