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Samarkand: Routes to Riches
I missed the original Age of Scheme. Thus I was rather glad it got reprinted by Queen Games as Samarkand: Routes to Riches. It’s not just a pretty reprint like Chicago Express was, but rather a conversion of a demanding auction game to a German family game. Gone are the auctions, say hello to randomly…
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New look
It was about time! I switched the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. I thought it would be a harrowing process, but it was fairly smooth (ok, my idea of smooth involves a fair bit of regexp fixing, mining data with MySQL queries and so on). This was my last active blog using Movable Type,…
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Endeavor and Kayanak
One of the buzz games from last Essen was Endeavor. It took a while to arrive at our group, but finally we got to play it. We got the full compliment of five players and started to explore and colonize the world after a somewhat complicated rules explanation. It’s a fun game, and looks really…
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Recent gaming: Agricola + others
I took the kids to Jyväskylä last weekend to see their grandmother. All in all a good visit, except not quite enough sleep for me, but that’s life with toddlers. Of course, board games were involved. In addition to playing a bit of Dominion (they’ve enjoyed it a lot, I’ve given my mother both the…
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First impressions of Greed, Inc.
We finally got to play Greed, Inc.. It’s definitely as good as it seemed to be! The theme is fun and works well, and the simple mechanics come together as an interesting game. I got a good taste of how things work, as after the first round of people getting fired, I ended up running…
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WYPS
I’ve been playing WYPS recently. It’s a new abstract game that combines word game with a connection game. It’s like The Game of Y, except the pieces have letters on them and must form words. The goal is the same: connect all three sides of the triangular board with a chain of your pieces. While…
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Cannes and Kansas Pacific
I wouldn’t have chosen Cannes for four players, but it turned out that way and I’m surprised to report the game worked out just fine. It took us about an hour to play, with three newbies and my one-game experience. As seems to be the case, the game was over when the movies started to…
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Peloponnes and Schildkrötenrennen
We had scheduled a game of Greed on Wednesday’s game night, but that fell through. Some other time, then. I did get my copy of Greed back, I had borrowed it right after I got it, so I was finally able to take a proper look at it. It sure looks great. The cover is…
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Shopping list
I’m not interested in buying lots of games, but as time goes by, my list of games I’d like to get slowly grows. It’s now big enough for a blog post… Samarkand: Routes to Riches is the new Queen-produced family version of Winsome’s Age of Scheme. I’ve missed Age of Scheme, but it sounds like…
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First go on the Tinners’ Trail
Today’s game of choice was Martin Wallace’s Tinners’ Trail, a game of tin and copper mining in Cornwall. It’s a delightful little economy game. I didn’t have expectations for it, I’d had just heard good things about the game. It’s a fairly simple deal. There are areas that are auctioned to players. Once you have…