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First impressions: Scout
Japanese Scout was designed by Kei Kajino and published by Oink Games in 2019. It’s a small box card game with a good reputation: it was a nominee for the Spiel des Jahres award in 2022, and several friends have praised it. Since my game group likes tricky card games, I thought Scout might be…
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Unlock! Game Adventures
I was two Unlock! games behind. Fortunately, both of the sets are available in the local library. The first one to arrive was the later one; this one had fewer reservations. Unlock! Game Adventures uses other Asmodee titles as source material. There are scenarios for Ticket to Ride, Mysterium and Pandemic. It’s a pretty good…
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Top 100 list, 2022 edition
My annual top 100 list is now out on BoardGameGeek: Mikko’s top 100 — 2022 edition. Making this year’s list was a slightly sad process. I have a two-year rule for my list: this year, I’ll consider games that I’ve played in 2022, 2021 or 2020. This meant a list of 146 titles. I’ve last…
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Mathias Wigge interview
Mathis Wigge is the designer of Ark Nova, a tremendously popular board game about zookeeping. What makes it even more impressive is the fact that it’s his first released board game. I interviewed Wigge by email to find out more about where Ark Nova came from. This interview was originally published in Finnish at Lautapeliopas.…
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Grabbing chips left and right
I played games with my game group after a long break. We played primarily familiar titles: Ark Nova, Krass Kariert, and Tyrants of the Underdark. However, we also gave a new game a try. Family Inc. is a Reiner Knizia title, published by Piatnik in 2021. Like many other Knizia titles, it’s based on an…
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Trendy zookeeping
I’m, of course, talking about Ark Nova, one of the hottest titles at the moment. Designed by first-time designer Mathias Wigge and published by Feuerland Spiele, Ark Nova has been very popular recently. A Finnish game store got a few dozen copies and sold them out immediately. I managed to secure a copy for myself…
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Escape Team
Escape Team by Fabian Hemmert. I received a free mission pack voucher from the publisher. The Escape Team home page. Elevator pitch: Escape Team is an app-powered escape room puzzle game where you print out all the materials at home. What’s in the box? There’s no box! The game is an iOS or an Android…
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Top 10: 2012 games in 2022
Looking back at 2012, ten years later, it seems like a decent year. It wasn’t hard to come up with a top ten. My top 10: 10. Keyflower. This is an exciting mix of weird auctions and worker placement, and the game works rather well with the whole range from two to six players. That…
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The Imperial Pearls
I wasn’t sure what to do about the latest Res Arcana expansion, Perlae Imperii. Then I saw it in the local game store and decided – why not! We haven’t played Res Arcana all that much lately, but I suppose the expansion is just the thing to get us back to artefacts, mages and monuments. We…
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Space merchants
Noticing that I didn’t play Merchant of Venus at all in 2021 made me eager to give it a spin. It didn’t take much to convince Nooa, and we played a game last Saturday. Since we’re experts – whopping three plays for both of us – we played to 4000 credits. It took us maybe…