Niagara wins the coveted Spiel des Jahres 2005 award. Hooray for Zoch; this is their second win in few years (previous award was 2002 for Villa Paletti). My first guess for winner was Around the World in 80 Days, since Kosmos hasn’t recieved the award in ten years (last time was 1995 with, of course,…
…make it hard to play. Crystal Code is a new speed puzzle game from Tactic and the designer of Ubongo. Players try to form chains of pentagons by matching a total of six similar symbols on the edges. Fastest player scores two crystals and two cards, while everyone else who manages to complete the chain…
…their influence in the game somewhat disturbing. Their effects are just too random. Also, I’m not sure why completing the wonders should be rewarded like that. Well, the rumour says the action cards weren’t a part of Knizia’s original design, which I can believe. Anyway, removing them is the simplest thing and improves the game…
…a bit surprised — at the core, Bridge is a surprisingly simple trick-taking game. Of course, on top of it is the bidding and the bidding conventions are what makes it so complicated, but I think I understood the basic concepts of that too. Perhaps I should try Bridge sometimes, with other beginners like me……
…gold to back it up. And of course, there’s one caveat: these are two-player game results, with no competition for resources. Competition should slow mountaineers more than river gold collectors. We were thinking about an expansion, too. It would be neat, especially if it had some new way of getting gold, to widen the options…
…five-tile puzzles are diabolical at best. So, a good one. I think this might be the Ubongo I’ll keep in my collection — I’ve so far sold all others away, because I don’t play them. This combines the easy portability of the Mini with solid difficulty of the Extreme, which sounds like a winning combo….
…the end of it, really — I suppose there are new Memoir expansions coming (at least the carrying case!) and BattleLore, well, BattleLore will be an endless mire of expansion material. So, I suppose I must say no to BattleLore, at least until I’m clearly more wealthy… Of course, there’s Commands & Colors: Ancients, with…
…movies: action films, romantic comedies and science fiction movies. Action films require stars and special effects, romantic comedies require stars and scripts and science fiction takes scripts and special effects. Stars can be made of ordinary people, special effects are made with computers and scripts are made of computers and beer. Computers are made of…
…— of course it was really, really terrible) inspired by it. When I told about it to Johanna, it turned out it was one of her favourites too. She had also made her own space game! That’s so cool. (Amazon.co.uk links: Hoyle’s Games, The Player of Games, Walking on Glass, Interstellar Pig, The Flanders Panel…