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Designers write about their games
It’s always interesting when designers step up and discuss their games. There have been two great examples of that recently: Gathering of Engineers: Daddy, Where Did Havoc Come From?, written by KC Humphrey, the designer of Havoc: The Hundred Years War and the input from Mac Gerdts, the designer of Antike; for example, this thread…
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The One Hundred
Mark Jackson and Stephen Glenn are publishing the results of a project called The One Hundred, where they’ve asked 65 eurogamers their 15 favourite games ever, scored the results and compiled them into a list of 100 best games ever. The results are published one by one… It should make interesting reading for a while!
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How to recognise hot games
Let us enter the SuperGeek Zone. Everybody knows Huber happiness, right? It’s a metric of how much happiness you get out of a game. It’s calculated as (game rating — baseline) * average length in minutes * number of games played. Ratings and baseline are on scale from 1 to 10, baseline is typically 4.5.…
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Antike and Heckmeck
I tried Antike with Johanna. It’s certainly not the best two-player game, but it was fun and I got some practise with the mechanics so it’ll be easier for me to teach in Helcon this weekend. So, yeah, it was fun. We played on the Middle-East side, Johanna played Arabs and the Greeks against my…
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Princes of Neverland
I noticed something: last time I played Princes of Florence was in January 2003. That’s bizarre. I was really into it at one point, but for some reason it never caught fire. I’ve played it whopping nine times since it came out five years ago, maybe half of those with someone else’s copy. That’s just…
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Fettnapf
First of the Essen games reviewed! A Finnish review of Fettnapf is up on the Finnish site. I went to the fair looking for a good Amigo card game. I had tagged Fettnapf and played it the first chance I got. It wasn’t a disappointment, but a rather pleasing little game. It’s basically a game…
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Gamewire is no more!
How can we survive? First The Game Journal quits, now Rick Thornquist says he quits Gamewire. Where will we get our news from now on? Thanks to Rick for his amazing work with the Gamewire, it’s been a very good resource! I would’ve been completely lost in Essen without Rick’s list.
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Through the Desert vs Go
There’s a long rant at the Game Table about Through the Desert vs Go, where he goes to show that Through the Desert has absolutely nothing to do with Go, and thus the games shouldn’t be compared. I agree — his analysis makes sense. In the ways he describes, Go and Through the Desert have…
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Two-player Caylus
Last night Johanna, in celebration of her birthday, wanted to play something. Something new, that wasn’t too quick or too long — now that’s a task! I chose Caylus, as I thought she could like it. It should also be pretty quick with just two and I was keen to play it. Well, off we…
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Essen pictures
Last night I went and uploaded my pictures, which can be found in my Essen 2005 photo gallery. It’s a small set of 80 or so pictures, but at least it’ll give you some picture of what was going on. Have fun!