This year has started well: I’ve played something every day. Yesterday was our weekly game night, and otherwise I’ve played with the kids.

• Suburbia was very good. It’s a city-building game, where you have to create a snowball economy. Points are scored during the game and in the end from four public goals and one private goal. The tiles have strong interactions, and you can create ridiculous combos. For example, I had four airports which worked well together, pretty much guaranteeing my victory (hint: don’t let anybody do that). Fun game, though I can see there’s enough book-keeping and tracking small icons that not everybody is going to like this. Suggest, maybe even Enthusiastic.
  
• Trivitria Up mixes dexterity with trivia. It’s not a particularly good trivia game or a particularly good dexterity game. 1+1 is significantly less than 2 in this case. Indifferent.
• FrankenDie is a Frankenstein-themed party game, where dice are rolled and the goal is to count the number of similar dice and yell it out to collect that body part. Once you have a complete body, all you need is a lightning to strike. Clever idea, works pretty well, but requires more than three players. Indifferent.
• Cardcassonne is an entertaining card game with some Carcassonne art. Nothing particularly wonderful, but not a bad game either, there’s some good tension to it. Indifferent.
• Trans Europa is easy to play, but requires some basic reading – thus it’s pretty good for my six-year-old son, who had no trouble reading the city names. I was pretty surprised to lose the first three rounds hands down. I won the next two rounds and the whole game, since my losses were close affairs, but my son lost 12 points on one round. He’s pretty good, but sometimes gets bogged down on inefficient route selections. Also, on that bad luck round he had just about as difficult cards as possible. I had difficult cards, too, but his red city was on the right side and he built that part for me, making my task much easier. Suggest, especially now with my son.

I installed Disqus comments on the blog, mostly for work reasons – I wanted to try them somewhere, and this blog seemed suitable. Migrating all 1300 comments to Disqus worked well, we’ll see how future comments work. Feel free to comment.