Author: Mikko

  • Season’s greetings

    Finnish Board Game Society wishes Merry Christmas to everybody. Sampo Sikiö did a great job with the greeting card, so I wanted to share it here:

  • Analytics

    I haven’t been looking at Google Analytics for this blog in a long time. I was slightly surprised by the results, really. First of all — search (ie. Google) brings only about 60 % of the visitors. I’m used to much larger share. What’s even more odd is the amount of direct traffic, about 21…

  • Dominion with Johanna

    Dominion is officially a great game. I just played a game with Johanna — we haven’t played any games in a long time. She enjoyed Dominion enough to say she wants to play it again, which is rare. It’s also rare to find a game that doesn’t annoy Johanna a bit, she’s usually annoyed by…

  • Silence coming

    I haven’t been terribly busy blogging here anyway, but I think I’ll warn you now: next year is likely to be the quietest so far for Gameblog. The first half or so, anyway, since our second child is due early January. In less than a month, that is! That, of course, is totally cool and…

  • Thursday session: Preußische Ostbahn

    Yesterday’s main game was Preußische Ostbahn. We had four players this time and I was the only one with previous experience. Hannu won the game, though, with amazing score of 649 — I was second with 421! This time I counted the turns taken. I started with a triple turn — a modest start, indeed.…

  • Helcon 2008 review, part 4

    Continuing from the part 1, part 2 and part 3. Le Havre. I had already decided to pass Le Havre because I felt it was going to be too long for me anyway. Well, Tommy suggested it for my last game in Helcon and I agreed, because I do want to try it. We got…

  • Helcon 2008 review, part 3

    Let’s see what I didn’t cover in part 1 or part 2… see also part 4. GemBlo Pyramid. This dice-pyramid game is apparently good, if played with the expert rules. Well, we couldn’t figure them out, so we tried the basic game. That one isn’t good, since making the pyramids isn’t particularly interesting and the…

  • Helcon 2008 review, part 2: Preußische Ostbahn

    Continuing my Helcon review, see part 1 here, there’s also part 3 and part 4. Preußische Ostbahn. Another Historic Railroads System game from Winsome, fairly closely related to Wabash Cannonball. However, this one’s billed as “German family game”. Indeed, the game is a lot more gentle — yet still quite a challenge. This time the…

  • Helcon 2008 review, part 1

    Helcon came and went. It’s by far my favourite board game event, and once again proved to be excellent. It’s small enough, about hundred people or so, yet offers plenty of good board game action. I travelled to Helsinki with Sami, Olli and Robert and five bags of stuff, mostly games I sold or wanted…

  • Thursday session: Tier auf Tier, Attika

    Actually, I’ll start with another session report first. Wednesday we went to see some of our playground friends. The kids — 5 and 7 years — don’t mind Nooa much, but they are all over me. Well, Nooa had great fun playing with their toys (Bob the Builder Duplos, a guaranteed hit) and I played…