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Horseless Carriage and more
Horseless Carriage is Splotter’s latest game tackling the early automobile business where players try to fulfill customer needs and manipulate market trends. Other games mentioned include Brass: Birmingham, a fine game; Spots, a quick, dog-themed game; and Cascadia, the Spiel des Jahres award-winning, tile-laying game ranked well on BoardGameGeek and comparable to another game, Akropolis.
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Forest Shuffle and more
I write about my experiences playing three different board games – Forest Shuffle, Fit to Print, and Moon. I had mixed feelings about Forest Shuffle’s balance and gameplay but plan to explore it further. I found Fit to Print, a tile-laying, real-time game about creating newspaper layouts, exciting and enjoyable. However, I remain indifferent to…
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SpellBook
SpellBook by Phil Walker-Harding and Space Cowboys. I received a review copy from Asmodee Nordics. Elevator pitch: SpellBook is a race of collecting magical resources, using them to unlock spells and then using those spells to unlock more spells. What’s in the box? There’s a bunch of spell cards and a familiar board for each…
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Top 100 list, the 2023 edition
I did another edition of my Top 100 list. This was the first list with the new BGG GeekList sorting system, where I can assign a rank for each item and have BGG rank them in descending order. That’s very nice for these top 100 lists. The number of comments the list received has been…
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Xiangqi, Shogi, Riichi and Brass: Birmingham
Here are some random notes on games I’ve played recently. Xiangqi and Shogi. Thanks to a book project, I’ve returned to Chinese and Japanese chess. I tried both about 15 years ago, but those were just single attempts. Now I’ve delved slightly deeper, thanks to a son who is keen to explore these games with…
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Earth and Space Base
I’m usually not interested in new games, but apparently, I can be persuaded. Something in Earth attracted me; I’m not sure what it was. I checked the rule book, which seemed complicated at first sight, and then went and learnt the game. It’s not that tricky, really. It’s a game of many cards, tableau building…
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Texas Showdown with Seas of Strife rules
Texas Showdown is a very good trick-taking game for five or six players. The point is to avoid taking tricks. The main twist in the game is the suit-following rules: you have to follow suit, but if you can’t, you play anything, and other players can then follow your suit. The trick is won by…
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Lautapelaamaan 2023
Thanks to Covid-19, Lautapelaamaan was last organized in 2019. Now it returned unusually: it was held in February and in Tampere. Like in 2019, the event was held in a mall: the Ratina mall in Tampere had suitable empty space we could use. Thus the Lautapelaamaan was held for the first time outside Helsinki. As…
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One game per BGG page
Michael Debije listed his favourite games, one per BGG page, on BGG: A Curmudgeon chooses one game per page… going deep. A friend made his own list on a forum, prompting me to make mine. It’s simple: browse the BGG ranking list and pick one game from each page. Here’s my list: 1-100: A Feast…
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Gaming Year 2022
Winding down. The number of games I played dropped again. A few years ago, I played over 700–800 games per year with over 350 hours clocked. Now, 384 games and just 227 hours played. The last time I had a year this slow was 2010, and then I had a baby and a toddler. I…