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John Bohrer on Age of Steam expansions
In a Geek thread called Italy is for AoS experts and France is for AoS beginners John Bohrer ranks the different Age of Steam expansion maps in this order by the level of their difficulty (from easy to difficult): France, US Rust Belt (basic map), England, Scandinavia, Germany, Western US, Ireland, Korea and Italy. The…
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Helcon 2005 — Saturday
Saturday was games, games, games. About 50 people participated, playing lots of games. Few bigger ones were scheduled and the Memoir ’44 tournament kept on going. Here’s my games: Indonesia. Splotter was the theme of the day, and I started with Indonesia. The game’s about development of Indonesian economy. When the game begins, there are…
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Helcon 2005 — Friday
Helcon 2005 was already the fourth time the event was organised. This time we had a new location, a meeting hall of The Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission. It was a good location for many reasons: it was clean, had enough room, there were lots of tables, good kitchen facilities and a possibility to rent a…
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Designers write about their games
It’s always interesting when designers step up and discuss their games. There have been two great examples of that recently: Gathering of Engineers: Daddy, Where Did Havoc Come From?, written by KC Humphrey, the designer of Havoc: The Hundred Years War and the input from Mac Gerdts, the designer of Antike; for example, this thread…
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The One Hundred
Mark Jackson and Stephen Glenn are publishing the results of a project called The One Hundred, where they’ve asked 65 eurogamers their 15 favourite games ever, scored the results and compiled them into a list of 100 best games ever. The results are published one by one… It should make interesting reading for a while!
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How to recognise hot games
Let us enter the SuperGeek Zone. Everybody knows Huber happiness, right? It’s a metric of how much happiness you get out of a game. It’s calculated as (game rating — baseline) * average length in minutes * number of games played. Ratings and baseline are on scale from 1 to 10, baseline is typically 4.5.…
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Antike and Heckmeck
I tried Antike with Johanna. It’s certainly not the best two-player game, but it was fun and I got some practise with the mechanics so it’ll be easier for me to teach in Helcon this weekend. So, yeah, it was fun. We played on the Middle-East side, Johanna played Arabs and the Greeks against my…
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Princes of Neverland
I noticed something: last time I played Princes of Florence was in January 2003. That’s bizarre. I was really into it at one point, but for some reason it never caught fire. I’ve played it whopping nine times since it came out five years ago, maybe half of those with someone else’s copy. That’s just…
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Fettnapf
First of the Essen games reviewed! A Finnish review of Fettnapf is up on the Finnish site. I went to the fair looking for a good Amigo card game. I had tagged Fettnapf and played it the first chance I got. It wasn’t a disappointment, but a rather pleasing little game. It’s basically a game…
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Gamewire is no more!
How can we survive? First The Game Journal quits, now Rick Thornquist says he quits Gamewire. Where will we get our news from now on? Thanks to Rick for his amazing work with the Gamewire, it’s been a very good resource! I would’ve been completely lost in Essen without Rick’s list.