-
Purple Pawn
Yehuda keeps busy with blogging. His latest project is the game news web site Purple Pawn. He covers board and card games. I’ve added his newsfeed on my side bar, so check it out. Apparently he’s looking for news editors, so if you’re interested, get in touch with him.
-
Tracon III
I spent most of my yesterday attending Tracon. Tracon is a yearly convention here in Tampere, this was the third time it was organized. Tracon is mostly about anime, manga and role-playing games. In the first two Tracon’s, I don’t think there was any board game presence, but this time the Finnish Board Game Society…
-
Memoir with Air Pack
I met Sami for some Memoir ’44 with the Air Pack. We had time for two scenarios, both from the Western front. We played Carentan Causeway and the Battle for Arracourt. The first one was a quick one, because of my careless playing. The second was more interesting and in the end, I won 6-5,…
-
Agricola, Xiangqi and video games
I visited Jyväskylä last weekend. Agricola was a must after last time. This time the boys were out of town, so it was just me, my mother and Ismo. We managed to play two games, first one taking 60 minutes and second one just 50 minutes. That’s very nice efficiency and certainly reinforces Chris Farrell’s…
-
Thursday session: Golden Compass, Halli Galli Extreme
After clobbering Hannu in Sunda to Sahul, it was time for Golden Compass. We had full table, four players, and off we went, on our trip to the other universe. The card playing mechanism was definitely more interesting with four players: you really had to think a bit when choosing which cards to take. However,…
-
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…
-
Game mechanics
Before, I used to do “related games” in my Finnish game reviews by hand. That’s boring and when you add a new review, deciding where to add the new game as related game is tedious. So, that needs automation. But how? I decided to do a two-part tagging system: theme and mechanics. I did the…
-
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…
-
Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy is one of the hot games right now. The fans — Brian Bankler, for example, his Tao of Gaming is a must read — are babbling about it a lot, and no wonder, as it really is an excellent game. I once said an ideal game would be a quick card-driven…