This year, Ropecon is a week earlier than usual. The reason is boring: Coldplay is coming to Helsinki on the usual Ropecon weekend and gobbles up all hotel capacity. Ropecon took evasive action.

We’re here anyway. This year, we’re promoting my book, which means running a stand where people can try Go, Shogi and Xiangqi. This was successful in Tracon Hitpoint in November and less successful in Kotae Expo in June, but we’re hoping Ropecon is the best con for this.

Friday

On Friday, we arrived just in time to get our hotel room, eat some food (Mapo tofu from Crazy Bing is my favourite dish available in the Mall of Tripla, where our hotel is), pick up some cheap ResQ donuts, and then head to the Helsinki Expo Center, where the con is.

It was raining, and we met a long line of con visitors. Fortunately, we had day passes for the programme, so we could move to a much shorter line. We had to queue a bit to upgrade our day passes to weekend passes and then a bit more to get our badges and staff shirts, but then we were in and could head directly to the game halls.

We had made vague plans with Kristian from Pöydällä and fortunately met him in the queue. After we played a quick round of Forest Shuffle, he joined us, and we could start the games.

Schadenfreude. I listened to the Space-Biff Space-Cast episode with Cole Wehrle earlier in the morning. They discussed Arcs, but Wehrle also mentioned he loves Shark. That was interesting. They also love Schadenfreude and discussed it in a way that interested me. I discovered it’s a rare Japanese game, readily available for 40-50 €, but also easy to mock up. I quickly whipped up some card designs so we could play in Ropecon (you can also take a Sharpie to a deck of cards, but that’s not how I roll).

We played a three-player game with Kristian and then a four-player game when Arto, another member of the Pöydällä crew, joined us. Schadenfreude is a straightforward trick-taking game, but the obligatory twists are good. First of all, the second-best card wins the trick. The winner collects the card they played and any off-suit cards. Collected cards are kept face up: they’re your points. If you get a duplicate card, they cancel each other. Suits run from -3 to -1 and 1-9. One more catch: the game is over when someone gets over 40 points. All players with over 40 points are eliminated, and the highest score remaining wins.

The name is apt. The game has lots of points where you can make mean moves. You can feed someone cards that cancel their scoring cards, or you can feed them points to get them over 40. It looks pretty clever, and I think my game group will enjoy it. Based on two rounds, the game is better with four players, but the three-player game is worth playing.

Dia de los Muertos. When packing games for the con, I tossed this deck of cards into my bag. “I need to get this out more often”, I wrote in February 2008, but that was the last time I played the game. Oops. Now, after 16 years, it was finally time to play it. Arto immediately recognized the Animal soul card from the game as the source of my BGG avatar. Dia de los Muertos is a funky game. It’s a pair trick-taking game with lots of special rules for the cards and a clever scoring system. The rules are a beast to teach for such a small game, but in return, you get a game where every decision counts and each card is loaded with significance.

I will say, “I need to get this out more often”. I hope that doesn’t mean I’ll play it in 2040.

Monikers. As usual, it was fun, but the winning margin was unusually high. Often, the games are quite tight, but now we won by 21 points.

Pax Pamir. Arto left, but Kristian was still interested in Pamir. We played two games: Nooa won both, the first in the first dominance check and the second in the final dominance check. Having the game end in the first dominance check is always dull, but at least it wasn’t a long match. The second game was more interesting, with loyalty changes, Kristian’s huge ten-card court, and plenty of intrigue.

1846: The Race to the Midwest. Kristian left us, but I noticed Jani from Pelaajani idling around the game library. I invited him to play with us, and he was interested in trying 1846. I had taken the game with me in hopes of playing it because it’s a fast game that doesn’t require poker chips (I had my laptop with me anyway). Jani had never played an 18xx game. I taught him from scratch – thanking past me for including a teaching guide in the game box – and we got up and running quickly.

Jani is an experienced player with a good attitude, so the game rolled quickly. Using 18xx.games as a moderator speeds things up, but I’m still impressed we finished the game in under 1 hour 40 minutes. It was five years from my previous play, so I had forgotten everything I knew about the 1846 strategy. I parred IC at 100, then bought it full of trains, only to realize I couldn’t buy my Big 4 into it… Let’s just say I lost the game like I should. The game was generally relatively even. My IC and Jani’s NYC were the best companies, while Nooa ran a much weaker GT and a decent B&O. However, in the end, Nooa had certificates up to the limit, while Jani and I didn’t, so Nooa won.

We’ve enjoyed playing 18 India in three hours and easily fitting it into a Wednesday evening. It turns out we could probably play two games of 1846. This is really a fast game and 18xx.games makes it even faster. This was also the most attractive game we played all day: several people stopped by to watch, and one asked if he could join up later. Let’s see, maybe we’ll play another game of 1846 during Ropecon!

After 1846, it was already 10 p.m., so we returned to the hotel to sleep.

Saturday

Saturday’s main event was our Asian board games demo table. Before that, we played some games.

Earth. I haven’t played Earth at all after the initial rush of plays. It was good to return to it. The cards feel confusing; it’s hard to tell which ones are the best to play, but I played the Fauna board well enough to secure a victory.

The Castles of Burgundy. I had played this once before; it was a confusing online game with a subpar understanding of the rules, which left me uninterested. Now, we gave it a proper go. It turned out to be a decent game. We played some more on Sunday. After the initial play, our games took less than 30 minutes, which makes The Castles of Burgundy almost a filler. I’d play again, but steer clear of the two-hour marathons some people report.

Our demo tables featured Go, Shogi, and Xiangqi. Many interested people came by to try the games. There was an apparent demand. Go especially is something that should be present in every Ropecon. I learned that the European Go Congress usually meets at the same time as Ropecon, which explains why Go hasn’t been present at Ropecon.

Of course, one can’t really teach Go in these circumstances. I used Atari-Go, the simple capture game. It’s not the same, but it’s quick, easy, and fun and provides some access to basic Go techniques. I then changed the goal from capturing one stone to capturing three. When I played softly, a game on a 9×9 board started to look like a real Go game.

That was six hours well spent. The rest of the day wasn’t as effective as the Friday evening. I hooked us up with Vilma Vihervaara, the Instagram manager for the Lautapeliopas Instagram account and a fresh debutant game designer! Her game Trollius’n Roll, co-designed with Juhana Keskinen, comes out in September.

Trollius’n Roll. This is a roll-and-write game. One player rolls the dice with various colours. Everybody has a die that shows how many dice they get to choose. If I have a 3, I could pick yellow, red and black. I then order those colours in the order I want and then drop them onto my sheet from the top in adjacent columns. This way, the sheet is filled. You score based on adjoining colour fields and public and private goals based on specific patterns.

It all runs smoothly. The way you get the patterns is novel, and if I played more roll-and-write games, this would be in my rotation.

Sunday

We started Sunday early and hit the almost empty game hall at 8 a.m. We had been hunting for Harmonies the whole weekend but couldn’t get it from the game library — it was so popular. Finally, we got lucky.

Harmonies. This game of landscapes and animals is obviously related to Cascadia. This is a very crowded niche of games, but Harmonies stands out. On your turn, you place three landscape pieces (nice wooden cylinders) on your board to form mountains, trees, buildings, fields and rivers. These landscapes score points based on simple rules.

Then there are animal cards, which score points if you place the animals in proper landscapes. Salmon, for example, requires a river piece next to a tall mountain. You can create one tall mountain, surround it with a river, and place all the salmon tokens in the river. Some are more complicated and require combinations of three landscapes. Setting up multiple of these can be tricky. Fortunately, the most challenging cards only have two cubes to place to get the maximum score.

There’s luck to all of this – I lost one game because many of my cards relied on rivers, and I couldn’t get any – but it’s also a very short game, so you can always try again. There’s something addictive about it. We played three games in a row.

Australia. This Kramer and Kiesling title from 2005 is probably mostly forgotten by now. My previous play was from 2018. I initially reviewed it poorly here but appreciated it more when I returned to the game in 2016. It’s a highly tactical game: you must think on your feet and spot the best moves, and that’s a nice challenge.

Porta Nigra. Another Kramer-Kiesling title; I’ve played this game in Lautapelaamaan many times. This is a solid euro title, with much to do and many goals to balance. I like it, and this time we played it faster than usual (in an hour).

Notre Dame. We wanted something relatively short, so this Stefan Feld classic fit the bill nicely. I was pretty rusty, but it was fun to play.

After some The Castles of Burgundy, we finally met Stefu and could play games with him before leaving. We introduced him to Schadenfreude and Oregon. I was surprised he hadn’t played Oregon before.

Ropecon 2024 was a success. We had a good time playing games. Our view of the con was narrow; we spent most of our time in the board game hall and didn’t venture outside.

Ropecon 2025 will be a different experience. If everything goes according to plan, Nooa is doing his military service and can’t expect to have a free weekend for Ropecon. I’ll have to go alone. Maybe that would be an opportunity to play some role-playing games? I’ve started thinking about what programme I could do; I was thinking about a lecture on Mahjong history.