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Spiel des Jahres 2005: Niagara
Niagara wins the coveted Spiel des Jahres 2005 award. Hooray for Zoch; this is their second win in few years (previous award was 2002 for Villa Paletti). My first guess for winner was Around the World in 80 Days, since Kosmos hasn’t recieved the award in ten years (last time was 1995 with, of course,…
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Tom Vasel’s site
Tom Vasel has set up a website called The Dice Tower. It has links and the description of all the Dice Tower episodes (The Dice Tower is his podcast he does with Joe Steadman). There’s also TomVasel.com, which turns out to be a also hosted at the The Dice Tower site. There you can find…
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Mikko goes podcast
Exciting news, everybody: I’ve gone podcast! My first podcast is up at the Lautapelaaja.net podcast page. It’s 9, 3 megabyte mp3 file, I think I managed to balance sound quality and file size pretty well. Unfortunately, there’s a small catch: it’s in Finnish. I spend about 30 minutes talking about Industrial Waste and play two…
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Finnish Game of the Year candidates
Finnish Game of the Year candidates haven’t been published yet, but I happen to have inside contacts and thus knowledge. Finnish readers can check the list of the candidates for the best adult and family games from the Boardgame Society forum, here’s a quick overview: Best kids’ game: the most interesting entrants are Geistertreppe, the…
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Essen guide
Ward Batty’s Essen traveler’s guide has been widely blogged already, but it’s pretty nice. There’s one thing I’d like to know, though: since we now have a laptop with a WiFi capabilities (a rather splendid PowerBook, even) and as my hotel room doesn’t feature WiFi, just ISDN/modem (WiFi is for business class rooms, it seems),…
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Decisionmaking
I wanted to comment on something Shannon Appelcline wrote in his blog. He has banned comments from non-LiveJournal users so I’ll just have to say it here: So at EndGame I usually try and be really considerate of what people might enjoy and do all the consensus twaddle about what we should play. Today, because…
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Poker chips — opinions wanted
I’m contemplating on buying a set of Poker chips. I’ve got my sights set on two different sets right now, one without numbers and one with numbers. I’m planning to use the chips not only to play Poker, but to replace all unpleasant paper money and miserable plastic chips in other games. However, I can’t…
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Virtual Board Game Stock Market
Matthew Gray has whipped up a Virtual Board Game Stock Market, where participants can buy shares in Spiel des Jahres nominees, trying to predict which game wins the award. Each share in the winning game pays $100 in the end of the game and player with the most money wins — of course it’s possible…
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Shadow of the butterflies
Yesterday brought me long-awaited In the Shadow of the Emperor. So far I’ve marvelled at the bits and read the rules few times, and I must say I’m quite thrilled. It sure looks like an interesting game, with a particularly heavy doze of theme. It sounds so good in theory I can’t wait to see…
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A pleasant kind of interruption
Here I am, having my breakfast in peace, while the doorbell rings. Who can it be, I wonder, and go and open the door. To my surprise, there’s a mail delivery guy with a rather large and hefty box for me. I open it up and what do I find? Australia, Labyrinth — Die Schatzjagd…