Gameblog

Category: More about games

  • Card games from Minion Games

    Minion Games sent me some demo copies of their card games. Sturgeon is a fish-themed game, where players try to collect two sturgeons. To play sturgeons, you need to eat at least bass cards and to play bass cards, you need to eat two minnows. Minnows can be played straight to the table. You can…

  • Arvuutin and Toscana

    Arvuutin is a new Finnish trivia game from Onni Games, the makers of Politix and Aether. This is a Finnish-only release, so I’ll keep this short: it’s a rather clever game, where everybody answers the questions simultaneously by playing number cards (all answers are numbers 1-100). Closest answer wins. Winner gets the question cards and…

  • Dominion: Alchemy first impressions

    I played few games of Dominion: Alchemy with my brother today, using couple of the suggested sets. I’m in the camp where more cards means more diversity means more fun, and from that point of view Alchemy is pretty cool. The set has several interesting cards. The new economy with the Potions is fairly elegant.…

  • 1846 quick notes

    We played 1846 yesterday, but unfortunately had to abort the game. We had played about 3.5 hours and had plenty of game left, when the time ran out — I was expecting we’d finish in three hours or so. Well, two total newbies and so on, my bad. Here’s some thoughts about the game: Basically…

  • RftG, San Juan, Blue Moon

    I met Olli for a small session of card games. We played Race for the Galaxy, San Juan and Blue Moon. I dropped my Race for the Galaxy rating from 9 to 8 (as the Geek rating guidelines go, it’s certainly a very good game — but only in certain circumstances, and that’s one thing…

  • Shopping news

    With more information, I’ve been able to drop both Age of Industry and Workshop of the World off my shopping list. Always nice when that happens before I buy the game… Age of Industry is locally available and the local folks played it, clocking in at three and half hours. No thanks. Even pushed to…

  • Samarkand notes

    I had a fab weekend at Jyväskylä. The games were good, too. I had given my copy of Samarkand to my mom when they visited few weeks earlier, so they could play it couple of times before I get there. Busy as they were, they managed a couple of two-player games, so we only had…

  • Aether online

    First: today was a very good mail day. First delivery guy brought me 8.5 kilos of playing cards from Austria, then regular mail included Veld Railroads and then another delivery guy brought me my Deep Thought order (1846, 1889). Happy as a clam. The big news, however, is the new online version of Aether by…

  • Shopping and building: Tori preview

    Designer Kimmo Sorsamo sent me a copy of his latest game Tori. I still haven’t tried his previous game, Epäillyt, which is a murder mystery in 1930’s Helsinki. Let’s just say that one didn’t get a very good reception among board game hobbyists and I doubt I could convince my friends to give it a…

  • Cursed Treasure

    I’ve recently returned a bit to video games. My brother pointed me to Kongregate, which is a game site chock full of Flash games. The site does several good things making finding good games easier. For example, there’s a system of achievement badges. The best games get badges, which you can collect by achieving certain…