From the monthly archives:

January 2008

Race for the Galaxy

January 28, 2008

Race for the Galaxy is one of the hot games right now. The fans — Brian Bankler, for example, his Tao of Gaming is a must read — are babbling about it a lot, and no wonder, as it really is an excellent game. I once said an ideal game would be a quick card-driven [...]

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Board game club: Antiquity

January 21, 2008

It’s been a while since I last visited the board game club. Bad timing and busy weekends… It was a real pleasure to go and to celebrate, I decided to play something heavier that doesn’t quite work with our Thursday evening sessions. First game of the afternoon was something lighter, though: we played Verflixxt! with [...]

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Thursday session: Set, Age of Steam

January 18, 2008

For some reason I hadn’t played Set before. After all, as a pattern recognition game it’s right up my alley. I had tried it in some Helcon or other, but there was a mess and nobody knew how to play and it just fizzled. Now I had better luck, as Olli introduced us to the [...]

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Thursday session: Heckmeck, Halli Galli and Cuba

January 12, 2008

Another good Thursday evening. While waiting for the crowd to gather, I opened the games with Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck. It was chaos, as usual. I failed rolls constantly, while Mari and Jaakko piled up worms. Well, Mari lost most of her worms by the end, but managed to win nonetheless. Heckmeck is nice, but then [...]

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Success metric

January 11, 2008

One of my pet projects has been to create a metric to measure my success in various games. I’m not satisfied with the obvious choices: sheer number of victories means the games I’ve played a lot are on the top, despite the winning percentage, while winning percentage alone lifts the “one win of one game [...]

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Thursday session: Cego, Citadels

January 4, 2008

Yesterday’s session was the last one before the Christmas break is over and we can return to university. So, card games (not that we don’t play card games at the university). We started with Cego, a curious German tarot game. In Cego, the widow (or blind) is 11 cards. The first bid is solo: you [...]

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Hot games for Q4/2007

January 1, 2008

And here’s the one final bit of trivia for 2007, the hot games for Q4. Shouldn’t be any surprises in store, but it’s good to have this one link in the chain of quarterly reports! Goodness continued from the previous quarter as the Thursday games were still in. Agricola is hands down the hottest game [...]

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Year metric

January 1, 2008

I’ve been a fan of Matthew Gray’s month metric. Now I happened unto his Every year 2007 update, focusing on the year metric. I haven’t been bothering with that, believing I wouldn’t have many high-scoring games. Well, I thought, why not — it’s a simple thing to add to my game stats package. I was [...]

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