From the monthly archives:

February 2008

Agricola, Xiangqi and video games

February 11, 2008

I visited Jyväskylä last weekend. Agricola was a must after last time. This time the boys were out of town, so it was just me, my mother and Ismo. We managed to play two games, first one taking 60 minutes and second one just 50 minutes. That’s very nice efficiency and certainly reinforces Chris Farrell’s [...]

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Thursday session: Golden Compass, Halli Galli Extreme

February 8, 2008

After clobbering Hannu in Sunda to Sahul, it was time for Golden Compass. We had full table, four players, and off we went, on our trip to the other universe. The card playing mechanism was definitely more interesting with four players: you really had to think a bit when choosing which cards to take. However, [...]

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Settlers of Catan Junior

February 5, 2008

I tried Settlers of Catan Junior with Johanna yesterday. The game is a simplified version of Catan with an age recommendation of 6+. It has all the basic elements of Catan: production rolls, trading and building. Everything is just simplified. Production rolls are just d6, building rules are easier (players must build villages next to [...]

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Two-player Golden Compass

February 4, 2008

Golden Compass is an excellent book (and a fairly mediocre movie), and of course it has spawned a bunch of board games. Most of them are based on the movie, but Der goldene Kompass by Kosmos is based on the books. It’s a race game: players try to go through the board as fast as [...]

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Game mechanics

February 2, 2008

Before, I used to do “related games” in my Finnish game reviews by hand. That’s boring and when you add a new review, deciding where to add the new game as related game is tedious. So, that needs automation. But how? I decided to do a two-part tagging system: theme and mechanics. I did the [...]

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Thursday session: Qwirkle, Antike

February 1, 2008

Another good session, this time with more shorter games. That’s nice balance. We hit off with Flix Mix, a favourite of mine I hadn’t played in a while. It’s a small Adlung card game, those just get stuck somewhere and then you forget about them. We played a practise round, which I didn’t win and [...]

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