I’ve been selling games. My collection is now 300 games, including expansions. That makes my personal collection about 250 titles, as we have about 50 kids games. My previously owned count at BGG now says 308. I suppose I can be considered an active game trader.

I’ve recently sold Blue Moon (complete set, except promos), Evolution, Black Friday and Offboard.

Recent plays…

• Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper has been on my watchlist for years and years (ever since I read From Hell graphic novels back in 2005 or so). I finally got the game last year and played it for the first time last week. It’s a complicated game, so some mistakes were made, but then it rolled pretty smoothly and I think we got some idea of what’s going on in the game. It is pretty good. I like Rummy, and this is an interesting variant with interesting complications.
• Black Friday got the boot. I played the game last week, and we had a pretty bad game. Thanks to early black briefcases, the economy went bust a bit too soon, leading to a 90-minute game (instead of 50–60 minutes as it should be). Bah. The game has potential, but it’s also more fiddly than I like. I sold it.
• Battle Line is one of true classics. I got to introduce it to someone who hadn’t played it before. He loved it, and we played six rounds.

I took my son to the board game club the last time. He was very thrilled about it, very excited. Too bad nobody wanted to play with us. We got one four-player game of Marrakech (Nooa won!), then we played two-player games. Fun, but we can play two-player games at home. Ok, there weren’t that many players and I understand playing with five-year-olds isn’t very high on most people’s wishlist when they come to the board game club, but it was still a bit of a disappointment. However, Nooa definitely wants to go again.

By the way, if you need a scoring app for iOS, try Basic Score Keeper. It’s free and flexible.

Playing catch-up… I started working on the year review, but I have to get these out first. Since the previous post, I’ve had one game session with adults (last week I had to skip because of Christmas) and have played several interesting games with my son.

• Preußische Ostbahn. I noticed there was almost two years from my last match of this gem. I’ve rated it a perfect 10, so I suppose I should play it, too? We had three players, all experienced, and used both expansions. It was a crazy game, with tons of money, more than ever before (this was actually also the first time with 100% correct rules, so maybe that explains). Lots of fun, this is one entertaining game. Hannu showed his prowess by winning the game while taking least turns. That’s how you roll in this game. The new German Railways edition is highly recommended. Enthusiastic, and this time it won’t take two years before the next game.
• Lancaster. Second game, and this one too with experienced players. Swift game, just 65 minutes, but I think I’ve had enough. Lancaster is not a bad game, Hannu for one loves it (though he’s won it, with wide margins, almost every time he has played it), but not my cup of tea. I don’t like the “I’ll take this castle, oops no you take it from me, well I’ll just grab it back by spending more squires” mechanic. So wasteful. I’ll play, but I won’t suggest this and will most of the time play something else, if possible. Indifferent.
• Es war einmal… (Once upon a time) is a story-telling game for kids. The players tell a common story. Each turn somebody gets a card and they must add it to the story, reciting the whole thing from the beginning. If you make a mistake — miss something, mix the order of things — you can’t add the card and have to discard it. Cards are points in the end. Simple game, yet rather entertaining, and quite educational too: it’ll teach the young ones to concentrate, to tell stories, to come up with creative twists in the story. It looks very nice, too. It’s language-free except for the rules, so if you have kids (say, five years or up or so), do yourself a favour and grab a copy. Suggest+.
• Voll in Fahrt. Apparently there’s something funny about the name of this game in English… This Amigo game is a rather funny roll-and-move, where players have a team of four train engines and they have to get at least three engines to the end of the track. It’s a railroad switchboard and parts of the board change places every turn. Engines can push each other and fall off the tracks. There’s plenty of chaos and much hilarity. With two players, play two colours each to maximise collisions and trouble. Very entertaining and looks neat, too. Suggest.

My numbers this year are nothing short of amazing, by the way. This has been the best year in gaming ever. Over 170 distinct games, almost 100 new games, almost 700 plays… Amazing. On average, I’ve been playing games every other day, and playing a new game every other day as well. Crazy.

This week, we’re finally playing Eclipse. Eclipse, as you might know, has finally broken into BoardGameGeek top 100, ranking at 83 at the moment. It’ll reach much higher. It has potential to go to top 10 or top 5, the only question is how many ratings a game needs to have to breach those lofty heights. Eclipse does have an average rating like few other games, and the crazy thing is that with the hundreds of new ratings the game has received recently thanks to the wider distribution, the average has still gone up, not down.

Two weeks passed again. Time flies. Stuff I’ve played recently (as reported on the Google+ page, which is worth following if you ask me), rated using the Avoid, Indifferent, Suggest, Enthusiastic scale described by Brian:

• Dobble. Also known as Spot It!, this is a ridiculously entertaining card game. The round cards have bunch of icons and the trick is that each pair of two cards contains exactly one shared icon. There are five different games included, all which revolve around recognizing the shared icon. Either you try to collect cards or get rid of them. Simple, really easy to teach, tremendously entertaining. This one gets high marks from me. The game comes in a small tin that’s perfect for carrying along anywhere. Rating: Enthusiastic.
• Pantheon. The latest from Bernd Brunnhofer. He has a really good track record and Pantheon doesn’t fail. The game’s very good. The game’s a bit complex and hard to explain briefly, but it’s basically about tribes expanding around the Mediterranean. However, the tribes are played one at a time by all players. The goal is to collect demigods and place pillars that score points. You can also collect gods to get useful powers like extra resources. Looks like this game has a decent dose of luck, lots of possibilities and plenty of excitement. Very good, like Stone Age before. Rating: Suggest+.
• Kissenschlacht. Fun little dexterity game for kids. Try to toss small pillows to the game box using a simple catapult. Controlling the shots is tricky, so it’s a fairly lucky game, but if you allow the kids to shoot from short distance, it’s not hard and the game is quickly over. Rating: Suggest, but will drop down to Indifferent eventually.
• Ubongo 3D. I hadn’t tried this one before. So yeah, it’s a bit difficult. The four-piece puzzles can be very, very hard, actually. I tried to solve one, just to see how well that two minutes works out. Ten minutes later or so I had to check the guide to see if the puzzle can actually be solved. I’ve owned all the other Ubongos, but have since got rid of them. I’m afraid this will meet the same faith, especially as the box is so huge, but I just might keep it — it’s certainly the most interesting game in the series. Rating: Suggest-.
• Kings of Mithril. My relationship with Mindwarrior Games started badly with Atlantic Triangle and I wasn’t terribly impressed by Odin’s Table either, but I was surprised at how much I like Kings of Mithril. It’s a simple game of tile-laying and die-rolling, there’s plenty of luck and sometimes fairly little control, but it’s also quite quick (45 minutes or so) and just fun to play. Rating: Suggest.
• Monte Cristo. This is the game with marble action track, where the player whose marble is on the bottom of the track gets to be the active player. The marble is then moved on top of another track. Clever, but it doesn’t rescue the game. Monte Cristo is a ho-hum euro game, where players try to get area majorities and try to have the right sacks at the right time. Nobody liked the game. Rating: Indifferent-.
• Blood Bowl: Team Manager. Ooh, Ameritrash! In this case it means “annoying, chaotic tug of war”. I dislike tug of war, and thus the game doesn’t work for me. I might be interested trying this with just two players; that way it might work. Our four-player game took 90 minutes, which is way too much for a game this unpredictable and frustration. Rating: Indifferent-.
• The City. Here’s a game that was pretty much exactly as I hoped it would be. Fast and fun game in the San Juan family. The game plays really fast and has just enough decisions to make it worth the time and the effort. Lovely. This one I must have, and I’m really hoping I’ll find one in the BGG Secret Santa box I have waiting for me. If I don’t, I know I’ll be buying one. Rating: Suggest+, maybe even Enthusiastic.

This week’s game was Lancaster, ordered from Germany back in September, now finally here. Took a while, but hey, it’s a Queen game. At least it wasn’t as badly delayed as German Railways or, ahem, the Samarkand expansion…

Hannu bought the game, mostly because it’s by Matthias Cramer, the designer of Glen More, and because the game got a good review from Spielbox and got tagged as a game Hannu would like. Well, he got that right.

Lancaster is set in 15th century England, where Henry V of Lancaster hopes to unite the country and beat the French. Players use their knights to gain power in the country.

There are five rounds. On each round, players first place their knights. They can be put in three places: castles, France or personal castle. Each place offers different rewards. In the castles of the countryside, they can be ousted by stronger knights and supported by squires. This is a game of timing and commitment. Get in early and maybe nobody will come to oust you. Go in late, and you have to spend squires to push the weaklings from your path.

In France, wars are fought. Going in nets you a reward from the king. Being in France scores victory points, possibly twice. Winning the war means more victory points, losing the war means losing the knight or paying money to bail him out.

Rewards from the countryside come in two forms. Either you can get a nobleman from the castle to support you, which means potentially lots of points in the end, or you can a bonus, like a new knight, upgrading an old knight or something like that. Pay enough money, and you can have both rewards.

After all knights are played, it’s time to vote. There are always three laws and three new laws to replace them. Players have one vote each, and one vote for each nobleman at their court. Once the three laws are set, they are run through, giving players points and other benefits if they match the conditions set in laws.

Then collect rewards, then fight in France, then it’s new round with a clean board. There are five rounds, after which the players with the biggest army of knights and the biggest castle get bonuses and everybody gets points for the noblemen in their court.

(In the photo above, notice the iPad. Hannu hadn’t printed out the English rules. He just had them in his iPad, and so did I. Aren’t we modern!)

It’s an interesting game. The box says it takes 60 minutes. It first seemed impossible, as the first rounds took a long time. However, then the game got a lot faster and in the end we finished our five-player game (three newbies, two players with one-game experience) in 80 minutes. So, the 60 minutes is certainly manageable with experienced players.

This is a Queen game, so production values are great. The game looks gorgeous and everything’s functional. The knight tokens are wooden blocks of varying heights, and the heights are correct: a 2 knight is the size of two 1 knights stacked together and so on.

In our game, I thought I’d try making my castle automatic. In your castle, it’s possible to get stuff like new squires, gold and promote those squires to knights (one knight is apparently made by combining three squires together). Each of those actions requires a knight to activate it, but knights come in short supply — each player has just two to start with. You can get castle extensions, which make the actions happen every round. So, I wanted a fully automatic castle and ended up with a castle that produces one knight and one money each round, without any action from my part.

I fought in France, with better and worse luck. I did manage quite well, too. Hannu ran away with the game, scoring something like 80 points. I was second with ~45 and the rest of the boys were all clustered within five points around ~32 or so.

Nice game. It didn’t leave me with a burning desire to play it again, but I could, I could — and I know Hannu wants to play more, so I suppose I will. With experienced players, this should go a bit faster, so if we can get from box opening to box closed in 75 minutes or so, it’ll be just fine.

My rating for Lancaster is 7: good, but not great.

I got a bunch of review copies from Tactic. They are probably the biggest board game publisher in Finland and as far as I know a fairly big in European level as well — certainly bigger than many of the hobby publishers we cherish, like Hans im Glück.

Their games are fairly mass-market, with occasional interesting titles from a gamer’s point of view.

• Rrrats! is a push-your-luck game, designed by Reiner Knizia (not the first Knizia title from Tactic). Nice bits: large wooden chunks of cheese. Gameplay less nice… The game has three variants, first of which is pure lottery with no decisions to make. The other versions add a standard push-your-luck element to the game. Roll for cheese, but if you roll blanks, you’ll lose everything collected on the current turn. I’m surprised if it took Knizia more than ten minutes to design this game. The one unusual element is that one of the symbols on the dice lets you steal a piece of cheese from another player.
• Jishaku is a game where you put magnetic hematite stones on a foam board. If the magnets click together, you must take them in your hand. First one to lose all stones wins. It first appeared there’s very little game beyond the initial wow factor of the magnets, but once you get a bit creative, this turns out to be a decent game. Nothing earth-shaking, no, but considering the game looks wicked cool, can be taught in two sentences and plays in about five minutes, it’s actually not a bad filler.
• Abalone is a classic abstract from 1987, now available in Finland in a new edition. I’ve been passively avoiding Abalone, as I’ve had a vague feeling that it’s not a very good game. Turns out it is — it’s not a great game and not a game I particularly like, but as an abstract game, it’s fine. I just found it a bit dull, as it’s so defensive. Starting with the Belgian Daisy setup did help a bit. If I didn’t have the Gipf games to compare to, I would probably like Abalone more.
• Offboard is a new game from the makers of Abalone. It’s very similar to Abalone, but tries to fix what’s wrong in the first game. Now instead of pushing any six balls of the board, you need to collect six points by pushing the balls to scoring areas worth 1, 2, or 3 points. Each scoring area can only be used once, which is a nice touch. The game still feels like Abalone, but perhaps a bit more dynamic. Then again, it loses some of the elegance of Abalone.

Looks like my game reporting is lagging a bit, again.

• Two weeks ago I introduced Attika to my Monday game opponent. This classic is still fun and an interesting challenge.
• Barons is a very ugly game (as can be expected) from Cambridge Game Factory. Too bad is nowhere near as interesting as Glory to Rome. The game seems very good, but turns out less interesting. The buildings don’t offer very interesting benefits and I’m afraid just building them as bland land is going to be the most effective strategy. Boring.
• On the other hand, Innovation was very colourful. I played a two-game match, where first I did well and my opponent didn’t, then we switched roles. Balanced match, then.
• Nile Deluxor works with five. Not great, but good.
• Carcassonne with a double tile set is a bad idea.
• Last week the Monday game was Ta Yü, another success. I won the first game with 99 points, then in the last game barely scraped 18 points — and won. The denial strategy can be powerful. Love this game, it’s very entertaining.
• Dizios is a simple tile-laying and pattern matching game. Fun, if that’s the sort of thing that pleases you. Super-simple game play, fun to play — really no wonder this one won the Mensa Select.
• Mondo is fun. Six minutes time to build the perfect world from common tile stock, like in Galaxy Trucker. There are goals to fulfill and choosing which goals to pursue and how is enough of a challenge, though the six minute timer has two minutes too much, the pace is almost leisurely. Apparently the expert version which adds even more goals makes things a bit more interesting. Anyway, good game.

I’ve also played Principato couple of times now. Games designed by Finnish designers and published by major international game publishers (well, major in the hobby sense) are rare, but here we have a game by Touko Tahkokallio (of Eclipse fame), published by Eggert.

Principato is very much a basic euro. Build infrastructure, collect cubes, score points. Points are scored with hidden goal cards, building culture and waging wars. Very simple.

The heart of the matter is an action system, where each player can hold two cards. Those cards are actions you can perform (collect cubes, build stuff, hire soldiers, basically). There’s also a row of cards available. You can either use one of your action cards or exchange cards with the row. Some cards force you to exchange them after you use them, some don’t (as a general rule you must exchange cube-collecting cards and you may not exchange building cards).

All in all pretty spiffy game, if a bit symmetrical and perhaps lacking in replay value. Hard to say. I’m not thrilled by the game (I’ve got it rated as 7 right now, which is probably correct), so I’m not likely to bump into the limits of replayability. It’s fun, though, particularly our three-player games which took about an hour. 90-minute four-player game was a bit too long for the content, but it’s bound to become faster with experience (and slightly faster players).

All in all a decent game, nothing to be ashamed of, but of course far from being the jewel of Touko’s ludography — that spot is reserved for Eclipse (which I should be getting my grubby hands on fairly soon now, if all goes well). If you like soulless euros you’ll find Principato a pleasant diversion. Also, at least in Finland the game is very cheap at 19,90 euros, so considering that I’d say it’s a good deal.

Today I was able to test the other two games from the Russian board game publisher RightGames (see part 1 for the other two).

Evolution: The Origin of Species is a fun card game, where players evolve animals by adding traits to them. Survival is of the essence: each winter the animals must eat. It gets tricky when carnivores enter the game. Most of the traits have to do with surviving carnivores: swimming, camouflage, burrowing and so on.

The game is fun, the animals created are entertaining. Ok, so this animal learns a swim, so it’s a fish. Ok, now it’s a fatty fish. Now it’s a fat fish that steals food from other animals. Now it’s poisonous…

Mika won our game hands down (scores were 33-9-7-6). His first animal remained on board, gathering an impressive amount of traits: it was carnivorous, very large, able to swim, had camouflage, it could hibernate to avoid eating, it had a tail to lose if someone tried to eat it (yeah right, that someone would have to be large, swimming predator with sharp vision, and that’s hard to build up in one round, so Mika could just eat potential offenders first)… All in all a monster. Despite having parasites played on it, it survived through the whole game, scoring an amazing number of points.

That sounds like a very strong strategy, but perhaps it was just a fluke from one game. Of course if everybody builds monsters like that, nobody can eat each other and somebody is bound to die come a hard winter… Anyway, Evolution is a fun game with some potential. If the potential plays out, I’m so buying the expansion once they get an English version out.

The Enigma of Leonardo is a Leonardo da Vinci themed game, where players play cards in a cross shape. If you get the three same symbols in row, you get that tile. Collect seven different tiles and you win.

The trick here is that when you play a card in your cross, the previous card is placed in the next player’s cross at the same spot, discarding whatever was there. So at the same time you’re developing your game and hurting your opponents.

The game is pretty painful. It started out fine, harmless and somewhat entertaining. By the time the game ended, I was just happy it was over. It was frustrating and annoying game that went nowhere.

The graphical design is a bit curious, too. The art is by Leonardo — nice, but also very boring, as there’s little new about it. Everybody’s seen Leonardo’s sketches. Also, the information in the card is contained within 25% of the card area. The other 75% is pointless background art. That makes no sense.

So, of the four games, we have winners in Potion-Making: Practice and Evolution, a clear loser in The Enigma of Leonardo and a decent game in The Kingdoms of Crusaders. Not bad!

The Russian game company RightGames sent review copies to just about everybody, it seems. I got a set, and I’ve now played half of the games. So far I’m somewhat impressed.

Potion-making: Practice is a fun game, where cards are both alchemiy ingredients and formulas that combine two or more ingredients into a potion. Cards are formulas in hand and ingredients on table. Every turn you must play one card; if you can’t make a potion (which scores points), you play an ingredient (which scores points if the ingredient is not yet present on board).

Once you get some initial potions done, you can start combining potions to make more valuable potions. Further combinations will result in more points. You can use potions created by someone else, but you’ll award them points as well. Still, you take what you can get.

Very nice game, I liked it a lot. It’s not without problems, though. I found the downtime a bit annoying, and I was playing a two-player game. The game supports up to six players, but I’d say four is maximum and even that requires players that are guaranteed AP-free. This game will just freeze AP-prone players.

 The Kingdoms of Crusaders looks like a grim game, thanks to very dark art by Gustave Doré. The game itself is a variant of Battle Line. Players play cards in five battles and the player with the better cards in each battle wins it. Three out of five battles wins the game.

The cards have five colours, one to four colours per card. There are four cards played per battle. If all four cards have the same colour, that’s a regiment. Whoever has more regiments in battle wins it. If both have as many, then the better regiment wins. If that’s tied, then you check battalions (three cards of same colour) and so on.

In practice, there’s going to be a regiment in each battle, because it’s very easy to get one. Two regiments is almost guaranteed to win a battle. The battles are fairly boring and first commitments seem to dictate the results fairly often. Contrast that to Battle Line, where the game is almost always exciting until the very end.

The Kingdoms of Crusaders is not a bad game, but it’s going to suffer from comparison to Battle Line, because it’s not nearly as good as that game. I don’t see why I would choose Crusaders over Battle Line.

If you combine two sets, you can play a four-player game, where three best players in each battle score points (3, 2 and 1). That might be a more interesting game, fighting for the second place if you can’t win would make the battles a lot more interesting. Too bad I only have one copy. I think the game should come with two packs, as that clearly seems to be the more interesting game.

Some notes on recent games. First some new games I’ve tried.

• Schatz der Drachen (Knizia / Winning Moves) is a nice twist on a memory game. Works well and I enjoyed it. My son didn’t enjoy it quite as much, though.
• Excape (Knizia / Filosofia) is a horrible, frustrating game. It’s a simple die game and offers little. Some say it’s a good push-your-luck filler, but I don’t know, not much pushing in it and lots of being frustrated by bad die rolls.
• SNCF: Iberia Expansion (David V.H. Peters / Winsome Games) is an expansion to SNCF, taking the rails to Iberia. The map has international borders in it (between Spain and Portugal, Gibraltar and Andorra), crossing the borders takes a whole turn but gives a 5-point bonus to the company. Other than that the rules are same as the basic game, so this doesn’t complicate things much. SNCF is still a top-notch game.

What else…

• I took my son to circus school and met a friend there. I had games with me, so we played String Railway while waiting for the kids to do their circus stuff. It’s a good two-player game and a good way to draw attention. I’d say it’s a pretty good pull-in game to play in a public place, it gets an immediate “what’s that?” reaction.
• It would be neat to make a, say, five times larger version of String Railway, with 1.5 meter ropes for strings and so on, and play outdoors.
• Nile Deluxor got very positive response, and was good fun with four players.
• I too got the bunch of games from Russian RightGames. Kingdom of Crusaders looks like a decent Battle Line variant, Evolution and Potion-Making are also rather intriguing. The Enigma of Leonardo less so.
• Those Russians have been very effective in spreading their games around. They must’ve sent lots of review copies around. A friend mine was offered the games, and all he’s done is a bunch of YouTube board game review videos in Finnish. Very good videos, sure, but still, not exactly the most high-profile board game stuff in the web. Perhaps it helps that we’re living right next to Russia here.
• We played Glory to Rome, first time in years for me. Five players was a bit too much for our table (and perhaps a bit too much otherwise as well). Lots of “wow look at this card” and “wow look the art is disgusting”. Heh. Good game.

Mandatory photo:

I was offered a review copy of Nile DeLuxor from Minion Games. Since I really like the original Nile, I was quick to take the offer.

This new edition takes a good game and makes it even better. What’s different?

• Proper box. Nothing too large, but the cards fit in, even sleeved. Good insert.
• Proper cards. The original game had really, really bad cards. These can survive play without sleeves.
• More cards for 5 and 6 players. Two new types of goods, one is added with five players and both are added with six. Stripping the deck is easier with 2-4 players.
• Monument expansion. New type of goods, stone, which allows you to build monuments that give small bonuses.

The monuments are fun. The Obelisk, for example, lets you draw three cards instead of two every turn. Small, but significant difference. Spices up the game nice.

I haven’t played Nile with more than three players, but I’ve heard the original version wasn’t the best with five or so. I’d guess the new version is better, with more goods available. I’ll have to try some day, but for me, Nile is still mostly a quick filler for two or three players. With the new box and all, I’m going to carry Nile along a bit more than before, when I had the sleeved cards in a ziploc bag.

I had a surprise chance to play Nile last week, when my son had a friend over. The friend’s dad came along and I got him to try Nile, as I had just received DeLuxor the same day. He loved the game and we played three games in a row and would’ve played more, except it was already getting late. We used monuments from the first game, as they’re not that complicated and I think they really add to the game.

Nile DeLuxor makes a good game even better. Nile is a good game, particularly as a swift filler with two or three players.