Gameblog

Category: Less about games

  • Just an idea…

    Last night I came up with a brilliant idea. Since curling is the second most popular sport in the Winter olympics in Finland (can’t beat ice hockey), here’s a game idea to take advantage of that: Curling Crokinole! It’s simple: Crokinole on a board shaped after a curling field. Players try to flick their disks…

  • My favourite designers

    Larry Levy had a column in Boardgame News called Rating the designers. He wrote about two different approaches to rating the designers, Knizia approach (counting a sum-based score from ratings given to designer’s games) and Seyfarth approach (counting an average). First approach favours someone like Knizia, who has a wide repertoire of games with varying…

  • Good service from Spiele-Offensive

    I must say Spiele-Offensive gets a nod from me. I recently placed a big order (almost 600 euros) there, driven by their selection (Neuland being the biggest incentive, I mean, I thought the game was firmly in the unavailable, you’ll-never-ever-get-it category). Ordering and paying (with credit card through PayPal) was easy and their shipping costs…

  • Gaming year 2005

    Here’s my traditional year end review. However, I’ve worked the format a bit, hopefully so it’s more interesting for other people to read. I was inspired by Mark Johnson’s post back in 2004, so thanks to Mark! Here’s the deal: first I’ll list the 2005 publications I enjoyed. Then come older games I played for…

  • Tom Vasel interview

    I’m flattered: Tom Vasel wanted to interview me for his Interviews by an Optimist series. The resulting interview talks about board games in Finland, evolution of board gaming, blogs and whatnot. It’s pretty neat, if you ask me.

  • Geek score

    Since everybody’s counting their geek score, here’s mine: 75 played + 36 owned = 111 points. That’s, of course, of the The One Hundred games. I consider my played games count pretty good — there’s a bunch of games on the list I don’t care about — and even my owned game count is ok,…

  • Order from Milan-Spiele

    Milan-Spiele was fast! Well, GLS was. The package was sent from Germany Friday, and it came yesterday. Of course, GLS didn’t care to contact me before delivering the package, but fortunately Johanna was home. I don’t mind, since it would’ve been a pain to carry a big box like that from post office. So, I…

  • Where’s My Geek?

    Grr. BoardGameGeek just won’t answer. I don’t have any particular need to use it, just some general checking, which I can’t do because either the server is busy or the site doesn’t answer at all, and I’m getting all aggravated about it. Talk about withdrawal symptoms… Please, please get back up, dear Geek!

  • Good offers

    As much as I wish to support the local game store, there are some offers you just can’t afford to miss. Ta Yü is a really good game that’s been either too expensive or hard to get. Now it’s neither, as just about every German online store is unloading it at 19.90 euros. Go grab…

  • 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.…