-
Settlers of Catan Junior
I tried Settlers of Catan Junior with Johanna yesterday. The game is a simplified version of Catan with an age recommendation of 6+. It has all the basic elements of Catan: production rolls, trading and building. Everything is just simplified. Production rolls are just d6, building rules are easier (players must build villages next to…
-
Two-player Golden Compass
Golden Compass is an excellent book (and a fairly mediocre movie), and of course it has spawned a bunch of board games. Most of them are based on the movie, but Der goldene Kompass by Kosmos is based on the books. It’s a race game: players try to go through the board as fast as…
-
Thursday session: Qwirkle, Antike
Another good session, this time with more shorter games. That’s nice balance. We hit off with Flix Mix, a favourite of mine I hadn’t played in a while. It’s a small Adlung card game, those just get stuck somewhere and then you forget about them. We played a practise round, which I didn’t win and…
-
Board game club: Antiquity
It’s been a while since I last visited the board game club. Bad timing and busy weekends… It was a real pleasure to go and to celebrate, I decided to play something heavier that doesn’t quite work with our Thursday evening sessions. First game of the afternoon was something lighter, though: we played Verflixxt! with…
-
Thursday session: Set, Age of Steam
For some reason I hadn’t played Set before. After all, as a pattern recognition game it’s right up my alley. I had tried it in some Helcon or other, but there was a mess and nobody knew how to play and it just fizzled. Now I had better luck, as Olli introduced us to the…
-
Thursday session: Heckmeck, Halli Galli and Cuba
Another good Thursday evening. While waiting for the crowd to gather, I opened the games with Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck. It was chaos, as usual. I failed rolls constantly, while Mari and Jaakko piled up worms. Well, Mari lost most of her worms by the end, but managed to win nonetheless. Heckmeck is nice, but then…
-
Thursday session: Cego, Citadels
Yesterday’s session was the last one before the Christmas break is over and we can return to university. So, card games (not that we don’t play card games at the university). We started with Cego, a curious German tarot game. In Cego, the widow (or blind) is 11 cards. The first bid is solo: you…
-
Christmas Agricola
I must’ve been pretty nice, since Santa brought me Cuba (befriending game store owners helps). Haven’t tried yet, but the game looks drop dead gorgeous. Mechanisms seem sound as well. Should be fun, might be one of those “nice, but like too many other games” games. My dear wife agreed to play a game with…
-
Thursday session: Xiangqi, Tarot, Tichu
We had to do a last-minute location switch because university is already closed for Christmas. Well, four players gathered at the bar we chose to play in. Not bad, really, as four is all you need… Jaakko was first to arrive and as I had set up a Xiangqi board to go through some example…
-
Shogi and Race for the Galaxy
I met Olli for a quick round of two-player games. Since the ever-friendly postman brought me my Shogi board, that was what we played. Olli has this thing with abstracts: he doesn’t really like to play them, because he basically dislikes their deepness, I suppose. In a sense, I mean, that he sees there’s potential…