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Through the Desert
New review up on the Finnish site: Through the Desert. Through the Desert is in Reiner Knizia’s top ten by any measure. The pastel camel game must be one of his best-recognised games and according to the BoardGameGeek ranking, the game is the seventh best Knizia title. That’s a well-deserved ranking, if you ask me.…
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Visit to Tactic
Yesterday we (meaning a group of active Board Game Society members) visited the Tactic head office and factory in Pori. It was an interesting and educational visit; it was nice to see a real board game factory. Too bad it wasn’t running at the time we visited it. They’ve got a pretty impressive production line…
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For Sale
Another review from my Finnish site: For Sale. Stefan Dorra’s For Sale is definitely one of the better small auction games. It’s a two-part deal that’s done in about fifteen minutes. Two rounds of bidding In the first round, players use their initial stock of coins to buy houses (cards with values from 1 to…
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Halli Galli
Here’s my Finnish Halli Galli review. Halli Galli is an entertaining speed game. Each player has a deck of cards. The cards are turned over one by one in turn, so that each player has a discard pile in front of them. Whenever the top cards of the piles show exactly five fruits of a…
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FinDipCon VIII
I spent the weekend in FinDipCon VIII in Helsinki. It was a pleasant event, as they usually are, with lots of games played. The Diplomacy tournament was of course the main event: the Finnish Diplomacy champion in 2006 is Juho Malin. Another big deal was William Attia’s presentation (or discussion) about Caylus. Unfortunately I had…
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Puerto Rico PBW over
Our PBW Puerto Rico game is over. It took about five months, which is too much. The delays got pretty bad at times. Well, I’m not to blame, even though I had few longer delays: I was still the fastest player to respond according to the end-game statistics. I lost, but it was close: the…
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Australia
Finnish review of Australia. Australia is a potential victim for too high expectations. After all, Kramer and Kiesling are responsible for the mask trilogy (Tikal, Java, Mexica) and Australia seems to fit with that group. However, that’s not the case. Australia is clearly a lighter game (even lighter than Mexica), aimed at the family market.…
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Thurn und Taxis
Review of Thurn und Taxis in Finnish. Thurn und Taxis is the latest game from Andreas Seyfarth (and his wife Karen) of Puerto Rico fame. It’s not a heavy gamer game, but more directed to the Spiel des Jahres audiences. As the game is named after the post empire family Thurn und Taxis, players are…
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Some Thurn und Taxis thoughts
Played some Thurn und Taxis at BSW. This time I was focused on the wagon-growing strategy, where you build five routes: three, four, five, six and seven cities. That way you’ll end the game (hopefully) faster than your opponents and will score plenty. Based on my experiments, I’d say it works. It’s not a guaranteed…
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Attribut in Finnish at BSW
Thanks to Markku’s great efforts, a Finnish version of Attribut is now available at BrettSpielWelt. We had the first official games yesterday, and it was a blast. The game’s so much better in Finnish!