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  • Gaming Year 2022
  • 1825 notes
  • First impressions: Scout

    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…

    November 17, 2022
    More about games

    Cat in the Box, Krass Kariert, Scout
  • Unlock! Game Adventures

    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…

    October 23, 2022
    More about games

    Unlock!, Unlock! Game Adventures
  • Slices of the colour pie

    Slices of the colour pie

    I was wondering: which are my favourite colours and colour combinations in Magic: The Gathering? Mono-colour decks My favourite mono-colour deck is crystal clear: green. The basic archetype of creature-based aggression works for me, and this is one of my most successful archetypes. It’s fun to play. Mono blue is my least favourite single-colour deck.…

    September 2, 2022
    Magic: The Gathering

    Magic: The Gathering
  • Top 100 list, 2022 edition

    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…

    July 30, 2022
    More about games

    Top 100
  • A history of fads

    A thought hit me while I was compiling my latest top 100 list. I could take each quarter in my game records and look for the hottest game of that quarter. That would show the fads and the flashes in the pan and be a nice snapshot of my gaming history. For each quarter, I’ve…

    July 24, 2022
    Statistical lunacy

  • Mythic Boros Aggro, now with Alchemy

    Mythic Boros Aggro, now with Alchemy

    Last month I made it to Mythic on Magic: The Gathering Arena with a Boros Aggro deck. Well, that deck still works, as this month, I repeated the achievement (my sixth Mythic rating). However, I used an Alchemy variant of the deck for some variety this time. As before, the deck is from DoggertQBones, who…

    July 16, 2022
    Magic: The Gathering

  • Mathias Wigge interview

    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.…

    July 2, 2022
    More about games

    Ark Nova
  • Mythic Boros Aggro

    Mythic Boros Aggro

    This is the fifth time I reached Mythic in Magic: The Gathering Arena. This time I did it with a new deck type: I was running the currently very popular Boros Aggro deck. Boros Legion is a guild from Ravnica and has given the name for red and white decks in Magic. Here’s the deck…

    June 18, 2022
    Magic: The Gathering

  • Grabbing chips left and right

    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…

    June 9, 2022
    More about games

    Family Inc.
  • Trendy zookeeping

    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…

    April 15, 2022
    More about games

    Ark Nova
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Rating scale

Here’s the rating scale I use, and how it corresponds to BGG ratings:

  • Enthusiastic: I love the game and want to play it. (9, 10)
  • Suggest: Good game, I want to play it and will usually suggest it. (7, 8)
  • Indifferent: I’ll play the game, if necessary, but won’t suggest it. (5, 6)
  • Avoid: I don’t want to play this game. (1-4)

(Thanks to Brian Bankler)


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Of green

The green colour of the sidebar is the Brunswick Green used by Nationalised British Railways – Western Region:

“A different color, also called “Brunswick green”, was the colour for passenger locomotives of the Grouping and then the nationalized British Railways. There were three shades of these colours and they are defined under British Standard BS381C – 225, BS381C – 226, and BS381C – 227 (ordered from lightest to darkest). The Brunswick Green used by the Nationalised British Railways – Western Region for passenger Locomotives was BS381C – 227 (rgb(30:62:46)). RAL6005 is a close substitute to BS381C – 227. A characteristic of these colours was the ease for various railway locations to mix them by using whole pots of primary colours – hence the ability to get reasonably consistent colours with manual mixing half a century and more ago.”

Wikipedia: Shades of green


There is a difference from play with dice, because the latter is open, whereas play with cards takes place from ambush, because they are concealed.

– Girolamo Cardano: Liber de ludo aleae (1564), translated by Sydney Gould as The Book on Games of Chance (Princeton University, 1953)

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