Gameblog

Tag: bad games

  • Crystal Code

    Review of Crystal Code in Finnish. Crystal Code is designed by Grzegorz Rejchtman, the designer of Ubongo. The two games are similar: in both games, players race against time and each other to solve pattern recognition problems for rewards. What’s most important, both games manage to avoid the most common pitfall of speed games. Often…

  • On The Spot Games

    Yesterday I got a bunch of games from On The Spot Games. All the games are designed by James Ernest and Mike Selinker, and aimed towards somewhat mass-market crowd, I’d say — they are very simple games, some definitely aimed for the party game audience, others for couples or families. I already tried Kotsuku, which…

  • Da Vinci’s Challenge

    Review in Finnish here DaVinci’s Challenge is yet another game trying to milk the popularity of Dan Brown’s books. Once again, any connection between this game and Leonardo Da Vinci is fairly thin and based on art alone (and even the art is mangled: let’s just say the Vitruvian Man is less of a man…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Elasund and Farlander — final sessions

    I met the two Ollis and Antti from Board Game Society forums (he was picking up the Power Grid he bought from me) for games last Thursday. Little I knew that our peaceful off-season university cafe would be overrun by the attendents of a psychology conference… Well, we had a table for ourselves nonetheless, so…

  • Touché

    This Finnish review of Touché has been up for a while. Well, better later than never… Touché is a simple game, where players are trying to form patterns on the board. Each round is play a card, draw a card, until someone forms a pattern. All pieces except those on the pattern are removed and…

  • Board game club: Edel, Stein & Reich, Bunte Runde

    Yesterday was board game club day, despite nice weather, sunshine and all. We won’t let that stop us! The turnout was good, three tables going on all the time. I got a nice bunch of people playing with me the whole afternoon with few changes. I suppose I can trust the club goes well without…

  • Touché

    Since I got it, I might as well try it, right — so we cracked open my brand-new copy of Touché. The game is simple enough: play card to place a token on a matching square on board. The goal is to create three formations of your pieces. First player to do that wins. We…

  • Game weekend at Tommy’s, day two

    Saturday was a full day of games, though curiously we didn’t play as many games as on Friday night. The games were longer, though. Stefu joined us for Saturday, and Tommy’s brother Miikka did a guest appearance as well. The games were disturbed by an excellent meal of braised reindeer (nope, it wasn’t Rudolph), which…