Author: Mikko

  • Success metric

    One of my pet projects has been to create a metric to measure my success in various games. I’m not satisfied with the obvious choices: sheer number of victories means the games I’ve played a lot are on the top, despite the winning percentage, while winning percentage alone lifts the “one win of one game…

  • Thursday session: Cego, Citadels

    Yesterday’s session was the last one before the Christmas break is over and we can return to university. So, card games (not that we don’t play card games at the university). We started with Cego, a curious German tarot game. In Cego, the widow (or blind) is 11 cards. The first bid is solo: you…

  • Hot games for Q4/2007

    And here’s the one final bit of trivia for 2007, the hot games for Q4. Shouldn’t be any surprises in store, but it’s good to have this one link in the chain of quarterly reports! Goodness continued from the previous quarter as the Thursday games were still in. Agricola is hands down the hottest game…

  • Year metric

    I’ve been a fan of Matthew Gray’s month metric. Now I happened unto his Every year 2007 update, focusing on the year metric. I haven’t been bothering with that, believing I wouldn’t have many high-scoring games. Well, I thought, why not — it’s a simple thing to add to my game stats package. I was…

  • Gaming year 2007

    Another year of games is soon over. Gaming year 2006 was good, but I think this one was even better! At least in quality, not necessarily in quantity… Good new games (2006-2007 games) Agricola — This year brought two very good games, worthy of top-10 or even top-5 spot on my personal ratings. Agricola is…

  • Christmas Agricola

    I must’ve been pretty nice, since Santa brought me Cuba (befriending game store owners helps). Haven’t tried yet, but the game looks drop dead gorgeous. Mechanisms seem sound as well. Should be fun, might be one of those “nice, but like too many other games” games. My dear wife agreed to play a game with…

  • Thursday session: Xiangqi, Tarot, Tichu

    We had to do a last-minute location switch because university is already closed for Christmas. Well, four players gathered at the bar we chose to play in. Not bad, really, as four is all you need… Jaakko was first to arrive and as I had set up a Xiangqi board to go through some example…

  • Shogi and Race for the Galaxy

    I met Olli for a quick round of two-player games. Since the ever-friendly postman brought me my Shogi board, that was what we played. Olli has this thing with abstracts: he doesn’t really like to play them, because he basically dislikes their deepness, I suppose. In a sense, I mean, that he sees there’s potential…

  • Verflixxt! with expansions

    Last night we were watching Nightwish (they were excellent!) while Nooa was with his grandparents. It was his first night away from us, but apparently everything went well… Can’t wait to see him, in half an hour or so! I miss him already quite a bit. Anyhow, since we didn’t have time for a movie…

  • Thursday session: Agriculture again

    While waiting for our fellow gamers, we played a three-player game of Race for the Galaxy. This time everybody knew the rules and played fast and we were able to finish the game in just 15 minutes or so. It was a close one: the scores were 32-32-30, and I was able to win thanks…