May 2003 Archives
What's going on, gamewise:
Order from Adam Spielt with my brand new credit card (I finally went and got one). I'm getting Amun-Re, Age of Steam, Coloretto, King Lui, Dia de los Muertos, Mamma Mia! and probably Land Unter too. That's about 90 euros worth of games. Add to that 130 euros worth of stuff ordered by my friends and my mother(!), and you'll get a nice little order. About 10 kilos of games heading my way, thank you!
Another thing made possible (or easier) by the credit card: I've got a copy of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective (suggested to me by Iain) coming for me in eBay.
Next Sunday is the next meeting of the board game club, it's actually the last meeting this Spring before the Summer break. I'm looking forward to play Mare Nostrum.
And finally: I'm starting a weekly games meet for the Summer. It seems there are other people like me, without a Summer job that is. We'll meet for games every Wednesday at the Klubi café from about 12-15. If you're in town, welcome!
I got a prototype game in mail from an American reader of this web site. It looks interesting, it's a quite flexible abstract game system. A bit like the GIPF project games, perhaps. But, that's all about it now - I'll write a detailed review if and when they start selling the game and want to go public with it. I just wanted to gloat a bit, sometime's it's good to have a popular enough web site...
Hi, I'm back home. Rome was splendid, I definitely recommend it. Especially if you like pizza and ice cream - last week we mostly ate pizza and the very delicious Italian ice cream. You can get really good pizza in Finland, but Finnish ice cream is nothing compared to the Italian. Of the various sights we saw, the one I'd recommend most is the crypt of the church Santa Maria della Immacolata Concezione dei Cappuccini. In the five vaults of the crypt, last remains of 4000 monks have been placed carefully in various ghastly shapes. Piles of skulls, lamp shades made of bones, mummified bodies wrapped in their cloaks, a complete skeleton of a young girl, bearing a scythe and scales made of bones. It was very eerie and terrifying experience.
About games... We visited a local game shop chain called GiocoFollia. It seemed to be mostly focused on video games and Games Workshop stuff (their window display had some very beautiful miniatures), but they also had a good selection of board games, especially Italian themed ones. San Gimignano, La Cittá, Princes of Florence, Capitol, Inkognito... I thought about buying Mamma Mia! (as I ate lots of pizza), but the price of 10 euros was a bit too expensive, especially as I'm planning to make an Adam Spielt order soon.
Most of the game were foreign editions (English, some French) with Italian rules, but some of them were in Italian (for example La Cittá). The prizes seemed to be about the same as in Finland: big box games were about 40 euros. Some more, some less. There were also some good board games available in one toy shop we visited. Still, seems like the Games Workshop hobby might be a bit bigger in Italy.
We also visited Florence. Didn't see any jesters hanging around, but perhaps they were busy entertaining the artists and scientists.
Something I wanted to share with you before I leave: I got a letter today from Friedhelm Merz Verlag - the company behind the Spiel in Essen. I was quite surprised. Turns out they had sent me a voting ballot for the Deutscher SpielePreis 2003, because I voted last year. Nice.
I was going to vote anyway, I'm just waiting for until I've had the possibility to try more new games. I suggest you all go vote, too. You can win prizes (games and tickets to Spiel fair) and of course, you can affect on who gets the coveted DSP prize!
I'll shut up for a while, now. I'm going to Rome with Johanna, so the blog will be silent all next week, while I'm going to have lots of fun. It's a good thing I got to play Capitol in the FinDipCon, so I'll know the sights. Also, we'll be making a one-day trip to Florence. I'll let you know if I see any jesters there.
(In case the title of the entry rings a bell: we'll been entertaining ourselves with this recently. Brilliant!)
More crazy stuff from the Seattle Cosmic: a variant of Cosmic Encounter, which makes the game more like the Interstellar Pig. Take a look at the Cosmic Pig. If I played Cosmic Encounter more often, that'd be something I'd love to try.
I went through my Boardgamegeek ratings and updated them a bit. Seems I'm becoming more critical: my average rating went down from 7.30 to 6.99. Quite a few games dived from 7 to 4, for example. It was an interesting exercise...
I got the results of the previous board game club meeting last weekend (which I missed), and I'm happy to see the success of Sunda to Sahul. I borrowed the game, because Ilari asked and they played six games of it. Neat! It's now the second most played game in our board game club this year (Isis & Osiris being the most played).
The game studies group meeting went well. My talk was rather unstructured, but hopefully someone got something of it. There were about eight people there, some of which were already quite familiar with board games. Different point of views, though. Petri seems like a fan of American school of board game design, citing games like Fury of Dracula. Satu was interested in board games from more academic point of view; they are a good way to study game mechanics, as the mechanics and rules of the game are transparent and visible. There was lots of interesting discussion.
I took some example games and in the end, gave my Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne on loan. I hope that results in two new converts (and of course their friends who play the games with them).
It was a rather pleasant two hours. The next meeting is in a month and then the discussion will be about classic computer games. My top three? Nethack, Civilization and Tetris.
I've been hanging around at the Puolenkuun Pelit web forum. There's not much about board games, but it's been curious to watch and participate nevertheless. Also, they're planning a gaming weekend in September, which looks like a good event.
Yesterday I prepared my talk about board games, which I'll be having tomorrow when the game studies group meets for the second time - right after an exam on WWW programming. It should be interesting, and I'm also carrying a load of noteworthy games with me for all the computer gamer geeks to see. Wish me luck!
Ron Hale-Evans has written a very interesting article about the Interstellar Pig in the Seattle Cosmic Wiki. Interstellar Pig is a book (mentioned here before), which features an interesting game as it's main theme. The game, says Ron Hale-Evans, bears more than passing resemblance to Cosmic Encounter.
If you've read the book, go read Ron's article (and comment on it, it's a Wiki after all). I'm now quite curious to read the new sequel to Interstellar Pig: Parasite Pig. Unfortunately it's not available in libraries and probably won't be unless it's translated in Finnish, which means I'll have to buy it if I want to read it.
FinDipCon pictures are finally available!
There's the event pictures to start with. I also took lots of game photos: Acquire, Capitol, Fabrik der Träume, FlowerPower, Go, Members Only, New England, Ohne Furcht und Adel, Royal Turf, Samurai and Taj Mahal.
As usual, the captions are in Finnish but the pictures speak the international language of gaming! Oh, and I noticed that I now have pictures of 50 different games. Neat!
A new issue of The Games Journal is out. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but the articles seem interesting. Especially the one about the evolution of German games - it should be handy when I prepare my talk for the game studies group next Thursday.
- Sunda to Sahul (1)
- Taj Mahal (10)
- Mare Nostrum (-)
- Tichu (7)
- New England (-)
- Sticheln (2)
- Löwenherz (6)
- Bohnanza (5)
- Wildlife (9)
- Go (3)
I played my first game of Mare Nostrum yesterday. Johanna wanted to play, as she's (like me) a big fan of the Civilization computer game. As there were only two of us, we both had to play two civilizations to get enough players. I chose Carthage and Babylonia, Johanna had Rome and Egypt. I knew Caesar and Cleopatra had some action back in those days, which would explain their steady alliance in this game, but I didn't know that Hannibal and Hammurabi had an affair...
It sure was great fun! The game started with steady growth. Babylonia grew to collect lots of commodities while Egypt became the land of cities and tax income. Rome and Carthage were bit behind. Soon all the caravans and cities were used and war couldn't be avoided. Rome attacked Carthage and invaded one province, but didn't progress further. Babylonia and Egypt kept their pace and built their first wonders on the same turn.
I was speculating about attacking Egypt as at that pace, Egypt would win the game as it was able to build a new wonder each turn. Rome reacted and attacked Babylonia, so Babylonia never attacked Egypt properly. It didn't take long before Johanna's Egypt had won the game. The whole game took us about 2.5 hours, played at rather relaxed pace.
The system seems to work quite nicely and it isn't too heavy, there's a good feel of Civilization and the game is definitely fun. Our two/four player game was perhaps a bit untypical with it's rather strong alliances, but it was great fun and I'm looking forward to playing Mare Nostrum with Johanna every now and then when we have few hours to spend. I'm curious to see how the end game work with more players, but I think Mare Nostrum is a good two player game as well. The box says it's for 3-5 players only, but you just have to be a bit creative! Don't let artificial limitations spoil your fun!
