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Voting procedures
In general I prefer awards handed out by a well-chosen jury with a clear agenda. Public voting prefers the popular games too much. For example, the winner of the Finnish Players’ Picks 2004 is fairly easy to guess — there aren’t many games that could do it. My bet is Carcassonne and if it doesn’t…
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Finnish Players’ Picks 2004
Last year I queried the Finnish gamers for their favourites in Finnish Players’ Picks 2003 vote. Now it’s time for the 2004 vote! If you’re Finnish or live in Finland, head to voting page to learn more. And if you can’t read Finnish, just e-mail me for more information!
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Spielboy and The Games Journal
The latest issue of Spielboy is out. Check it out — it’s the typical mixture of interesting articles and, ehm, artistic pictures. Most interesting article this time is Do I Offend?, which takes a look at the ways how games can offend people. It’s interesting, because I just recently wrote a column at Lautapelit.fi on…
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St. Petersburg PC version
Chris Brooks mentioned the St. Petersburg PC version. I downloaded it (it’s available at the Westpark Gamers website) and tried it. It’s neat, but the user interface looks like it’s done by an engineer and not a designer. However, it works — only thing I’m missing is the cards other players have bought. They are…
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Best of the two years
This blog is two years old now. It’s a fairly long time in the world of blogging, I think I read somewhere most blogs will fold in much shorter time. Hopefully Gameblog will continue for a long time. I wanted to compile some kind of list about the best entries I’ve written. I had some…
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Power Grid and StreetSoccer
First: this is entry #500. Now that’s something. I dropped by Brettspielwelt today to play some games. My main interest was to try StreetSoccer in realtime after playing so much of it in Little Golem. It was fun, though I don’t like the BSW interface. I’d like to have a neat and clear 2d board…
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Gmail accounts
I have few Gmail invites to hand out. If someone is interested, send a request to my Gmail account (msaari at Gmail) and tell me why you should have one. You’re guaranteed to get one if you have a boardgame-related blog. Invites I can send are limited, get yours while they are available. Edit: they’re…
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Little Golem
I recently registered at Little Golem. It’s a play-by-web site featuring a selection of games. StreetSoccer should be of interest to some (looks like Iain tried it), I’m there mostly to play Go. The interface is inferior to my regular haunt, Dragon Go Server, but Little Golem has something Dragon still hasn’t: well-organised tournaments. Little…
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Austrian Game of the Year awards
Mik Svellov (of brilliant Brett’n’Board) announced the Austrian Spiel des Spiele awards for this year. There’s a list of award winners either at his SDS page or my GeekList. While I don’t really care about the award (it has very short history and none of the effect of Spiel des Jahres awards), there’s something quite…
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Power Grid
I spent some quality time in Brettspielwelt playing Power Grid. I hadn’t tried it there before, but the interface turned out to be rather obvious. I had only one problem: the message window was only one row tall when I expanded the window to full-screen size (a must when playing Power Grid). I played three…