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Pentago
This review in Finnish Pentago, the Finnish Adult Game of the year for 2006, is a twist on good old naughts and crosses. Players try to form five in a row on a 6×6 grid. That’s fairly boring, but fortunately that’s not all. The twist is in the board, which is divided into quadrants of…
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Viva Topo!
Finnish edition of this review It’s easy to dismiss Viva Topo! as a simple game for kids. That’s what it is, but it’s also more! It’s become the current favourite of me and my wife. We play it together, as our son is still way too young for board games. Viva Topo! is a simple…
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Da Vinci’s Challenge
I played Da Vinci’s Challenge with Johanna yesterday. She hated it, and I didn’t like it much better. Basically it’s a simple abstract game, where pieces are laid on a board with a Flower of Life pattern. It’s nice, except the game is somewhat boring, counting points is tedious as you must check carefully to…
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Quick touch with Pentago
I played Pentago, the Finnish game of the year, yesterday with Johanna. My darling wife was amazed when she heard that was the winner. She may not be a hardcore gamer, but she isn’t clueless either! The game sucks, simply put. It’s your typical naughts-and-crosses on six by six board; one board quadrant is rotated…
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Hot Games for Q3/2006
Here’s a list of hottest games for the third quarter of 2006 for me. This is based on number of plays, my enjoyment of the game and the novelty value, so new games tend to show up higher on the list. You can also check the previous quarter, with completely different games. Memoir ’44 —…
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BGG ratings correlation
I miss the ratings correlation tool from BoardGameGeek. Actually, I miss it so much, I went and built my own: BGG ratings correlation. Type in two usernames and you’ll get the correlation between the ratings. The tool will cache the collections to reduce the strain to Geek servers (not that it’s a huge problem), and…
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Celtica
I got a review copy of Celtica, the much-dismissed game from Kramer and Kiesling. I don’t get the really bad ratings; the game has an average of 5.2 now, I’d expect something above 6 (like the 6.4 for That’s Life! — I think the games are on pretty equal level). We played with Johanna, and…
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Age of Steam in Pennsylvania
Yesterday I went to the Board game club with a mission: I want to play Age of Steam! It took some trying, but I got a group of four together to play 1830’s Pennsylvania. It immediately leaped to the top of the ranking: it’s one of my favourite AoS maps. The trick of the map…
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BookMooch
This is off-topic, but interesting enough. Reading is one of my passions outside board games. My tastes can be a bit difficult: many of the books I’d like to read are not translated (or are translated with quite a delay) and the availability of English books in libraries is pretty weak here. Buying all the…
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Finnish Players’ Picks 2006
Finnish Players’ Picks have been chosen for 2006! The winner is Caylus. Nice surprise, I’d say. I wonder how much the fast release of the Finnish edition helped… A GeekList of top 25 games is once again available, as are the complete results.