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Agricola, Xiangqi and video games
I visited Jyväskylä last weekend. Agricola was a must after last time. This time the boys were out of town, so it was just me, my mother and Ismo. We managed to play two games, first one taking 60 minutes and second one just 50 minutes. That’s very nice efficiency and certainly reinforces Chris Farrell’s…
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Thursday session: Golden Compass, Halli Galli Extreme
After clobbering Hannu in Sunda to Sahul, it was time for Golden Compass. We had full table, four players, and off we went, on our trip to the other universe. The card playing mechanism was definitely more interesting with four players: you really had to think a bit when choosing which cards to take. However,…
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Settlers of Catan Junior
I tried Settlers of Catan Junior with Johanna yesterday. The game is a simplified version of Catan with an age recommendation of 6+. It has all the basic elements of Catan: production rolls, trading and building. Everything is just simplified. Production rolls are just d6, building rules are easier (players must build villages next to…
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Two-player Golden Compass
Golden Compass is an excellent book (and a fairly mediocre movie), and of course it has spawned a bunch of board games. Most of them are based on the movie, but Der goldene Kompass by Kosmos is based on the books. It’s a race game: players try to go through the board as fast as…
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Game mechanics
Before, I used to do “related games” in my Finnish game reviews by hand. That’s boring and when you add a new review, deciding where to add the new game as related game is tedious. So, that needs automation. But how? I decided to do a two-part tagging system: theme and mechanics. I did the…
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Thursday session: Qwirkle, Antike
Another good session, this time with more shorter games. That’s nice balance. We hit off with Flix Mix, a favourite of mine I hadn’t played in a while. It’s a small Adlung card game, those just get stuck somewhere and then you forget about them. We played a practise round, which I didn’t win and…
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Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy is one of the hot games right now. The fans — Brian Bankler, for example, his Tao of Gaming is a must read — are babbling about it a lot, and no wonder, as it really is an excellent game. I once said an ideal game would be a quick card-driven…
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Board game club: Antiquity
It’s been a while since I last visited the board game club. Bad timing and busy weekends… It was a real pleasure to go and to celebrate, I decided to play something heavier that doesn’t quite work with our Thursday evening sessions. First game of the afternoon was something lighter, though: we played Verflixxt! with…
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Thursday session: Set, Age of Steam
For some reason I hadn’t played Set before. After all, as a pattern recognition game it’s right up my alley. I had tried it in some Helcon or other, but there was a mess and nobody knew how to play and it just fizzled. Now I had better luck, as Olli introduced us to the…
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Thursday session: Heckmeck, Halli Galli and Cuba
Another good Thursday evening. While waiting for the crowd to gather, I opened the games with Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck. It was chaos, as usual. I failed rolls constantly, while Mari and Jaakko piled up worms. Well, Mari lost most of her worms by the end, but managed to win nonetheless. Heckmeck is nice, but then…