I wrote some new reviews. The St. Petersburg review has been up for a week, while the Tom Tube review went just up. Both are in Finnish.
You’ve heard me rave about St. Petersburg quite enough, and I’ll continue that whenever I happen to play the game.
In the other hand, Tom Tube is perhaps less known. It has just 64 reviews at the Geek and I certainly think it would deserve more publicity. Of course, Mitchell Thomashow’s excellent review in The Games Journal has probably worked wonders. If you want to know more about the game, I suggest you read that. And if you want to only know about the game, skip until you see pictures.
Anyway, it’s a fun game. I like it a lot. There’s a big dose of luck of the draw, but some tiles are good for you, some tiles are useful for disturbing your opponent and only a small amount of tiles are really useless. The tiles are all weird, though, and often point at totally wrong directions. But that’s a feature of the game — you should forget right away any plans of making nice, straight paths. Thanks to the rhomboid tiles, that’s practically impossible. Your paths will twist and turn, that’s how the game works. And hey, that’s what’s fun in the game…
It’s also very pretty. My only gripe is the pointy edges of the tiles, they have a tendency to stick into my fingertips. Ouch. Not suitable for small children, this game. The tiles are colourful, though, the yellow and red pipes look smashing against the dark background of the deep space.