October 2004 Archives

Unless something force majeure -level happens, I'm going to Essen next year. I already booked a hotel room, too. My current choice is Hotel An der Gruga, which is slightly on the expensive side, but has a brilliant location. Find P3 on Mik's Essen Hall guide and yeah, that's where the hotel is! 500 meters or less to the hall entrances. I reckon if I have to pay 140 euros a night for a double room, it better be in a good location.

Turns out, by the way, that surprising many hotels are already booked up for Essen 2005. I guess the people who use the smaller hotels near the fair center book them every year. Well, Gruga should be nice enough, so I'm not complaining.

Oh, how can one's own name look so gorgeous, when it's printed in a game. To be honest, getting a name on the box cover with large print would be even more gorgeous, but even small name in the end of the rulebook is just great. Just great...

The BoardGameGeek guys just keep on coming up with new features. Now they offer RSS feeds on individual games. The urls are in format http://www.boardgamegeek.com/gamexml/[gameid]. For example, here's War of the Ring. I'm actually not sure if this is a new feature at all, but I just noticed it today myself. It's a nice way to keep an eye on an interesting game.

The first boardgame club meeting this Fall was yesterday. It sure was great to get some gaming action going on. We had a decent showing, with about two tables going on most of the time.

First game I played was Fifth Avenue. It was much better than the last time. This time even the scoring action saw some use - black cards were a desired commodity. Erkka almost won the game, thanks to his massive skyscraper lots - with up to five skyscrapers placed on one area. However, it was the Central Park that spelled his downfall. He didn't have any skyscrapers there, we drew three different business icons and Olli got a four-point lead over Erkka. With even three points for each CP skyscraper, Erkka's lead would've been enough.

I mentioned the thing about businesses while explaining the rules. The first three groups of businesses were still placed fast, but then it stopped and everybody concentrated more on skyscrapers. The game took little over an hour, which is a pretty good time for this game. What's even more interesting, the game ended because we had two building stops. That was interesting! I'm certainly interested to play the game more, but I think I'll make sure I'll have four players next time, too. Three might be just too little for this one.

After that, I kept the same group of guys and played a prototype of mine with them. It's a word game, where players form words in certain categories. Letter cards limit the players' choice of words. It was interesting, but needs some fixing. As I suspected, the letter distribution of the cards was off and the game was slightly too short, maybe. It also turned out the game needs a timer, as it takes some heavy thinking to form the words out of random jumble of letters. However, it certainly looks promising. I'll make the fixes before Helcon and try it out there.

We had a large group and thus ended up playing Finstere Flure. Our group had several people who hadn't tried this gem yet, so it was a very good choice. If Derk and Aldie would ask me for my favourite six+ player game, this would be my pick. It's always such a blast. This time, though, the experience was slightly hurt by boring dungeon design. Monster kept running in the middle of the dungeon, so after the masses cleared that area, the road to freedom was open. Next time I'll plonk down the two teleport exits in the dungeon exit corner to make it more interesting... I wonder if there's some general idea on how to make a good and interesting dungeon?

After the horror I got Janne and Ville to join me to try out Dos Rios. It was, uh, interesting. Janne won the game hands down, it was over in just 25 minutes. He got three casas and a hacienda, while me and Ville had just our haciendas (bad strategy). We just didn't bowb him enough, I guess. I'm a bit on the fence here, the game is certainly quite chaotic. There's no forward planning, you just try to wreak havoc as much as you can on your turn. That can be fun with the right people, I think, and I'm looking forward to playing the game again now I know how not to play it... And yeah, I must say the river mechanic is very neat and I like it a lot. Clever bit of design, that one.

Antti wanted to play St. Petersburg - obviously I agreed. We got Robert and Erkka join in, too. In one point of the game, a player couldn't buy a worker which someone else got. Can you guess who's who by just looking at the scores: Robert 97, Mikko 79, Erkka 70, Antti 36?

Well, yeah, it was Antti who didn't get the farmer and Robert who did. At that point I commented that Antti lost (I'd like to see a St. Pete newbie who wins against experienced players) and Robert won the game and I was correct. There was no hope for me to catch Robert anymore. That's what wrong with St. Petersburg: Antti's mistake (a typical newbie one, too) had a very strong effect on the result of the game. However, I'm not overly annoyed by this - it's natural thing in a game like this. For others, of course, this is a perfectly good reason to hate the game and I can understand that, too.

Victory & Honor was high on my list of games to play. So, I persuaded the guys to give it a go. Robert was there the previous time, when we had failed several rules. This time the only thing we got wrong was the artillery, which was somewhat minor. So, we got a full four rounds of good action, which was nice. I teamed up with Robert (which was of course the fairest way to do it, since we had previous experience) and kicked butt 187-78. We had some mighty fine luck with Robert scoring several good cavalry hits. You know, starting the first phase with a general in the middle is a very good stratagem, but a good cavalry hit will hurt that one.

Victory & Honor is a clever and fun game. The partnership play works well, I even started to figure out what kind of moves it takes. Throwing tricks to one's partner is useful - we had a very successful phase where I scored no cards. Robert, instead, had tons of them. Great fun, but I still have to write the clearer rules for this one...

Robert's luck continued in San Juan. His gold mine worked, what, five times out of seven or something like that. Meanwhile, I didn't see a single bonus building even though I went through lots of cards. I took it calmly: with cards like these, even Alex Rockwell couldn't win. I just fought over the second place and scored that, with less than 20 points. What a sad game, but these things happen every now and then in games as dependant on luck as San Juan - there's no reason to take it heavily.

One last game: Crokinole - I had to play it, since I carried it over and nobody had played it yet. I still had the touch, as I won Erkka 100-0!

I got Dos Rios yesterday. I'm not too keen on Franz-Benno Delonge's work (well, TransAmerica), but Dos Rios had such a neat idea in the river system that I just wanted to try it out. I'm not expecting too much, if it's good I'm surprised positively. I'm afraid it might be too tactical and chaotic, but that remains to be seen. I do like forward planning and Dos Rios will offer very little of that... One thing it depends on greatly is the speed of the players: if I'm stuck with slow players, it'll be pain. With swift players, it'll probably be great fun.

And that's a nasty thing in a game, really - how to review a game where one's enjoyment is so much dependent on other players? But not all games have such problems, so I'll just slap a disclaimer "great, if your gaming buddies are quick players or you have good patience".

Funny anecdote, though: the rulebook says Dos Rios is Delonge's first major game release after Hellas, a small game in Kosmos two-player line. Yeah, nice, but what about TransAmerica? Even though I don't like it, I still think it counts as a major game, being a Spiel des Jahres finalist and all that... But yeah, I think the key here is that TransAmerica is not a Kosmos game...

Mindball stretches definitions. It looks like a dexterity game, but instead of your muscles, you control the ball with your brains. In order to move the ball (or the magnets controlling the ball) towards your opponents end, you must relax. The system monitors Alpha and Theta waves of the brains and whoever chills out most wins the game.

What's best, they're selling these tables. Too bad the tables cost over 15000 euros. Were I a millionaire...

(via Boing Boing)

With my job and all, last three months have been very quiet games-wise. So, the first thing I did on my first day off from work was to head to Brettspielwelt and play some games!

It was quiet this time of day, but I managed to play few two-player games of
San Juan and St. Petersburg. How refreshing. I did well, too, winning three out of five games. I still have it. The only San Juan game I lost was mostly because I had to wade through a big bunch of cards without any large buildings.

I'm looking forward to next weekend and board game club and of course, Helcon... I want to play more games!

I'm currently having very exciting time. I'm playing in the Little Golem StreetSoccer championship. My goal was not to be demoted to fifth level, but since the championship started, I've learned how to play, my rating has climbed up to mid-1500s and it looks like I might actually get a promotion to the third level. All it takes is placing in the top four of my league division.

I'm now seventh, with four games remaining. If I win three of those games (which is certainly possible), I think I'm in the top four: Johnny049 will probably win, I can't beat Enrico and I would tie with Torben who has a better Son rating, so that would leave the fourth place for me. Valentin, Michael Engels and Real Manou can't reach 60 points. There are some black horses with relatively few games played (Erik Arneson is the worst), so that brings some uncertainty to my calculations. And yeah, I still need to win those games. With some luck, I'll win all four which would make me quite safe.

This whole championship deal really spices up things, makes playing the games so much more interesting.

Meanwhile, I kicked Iain's butt in Twixt, now we're playing Amazons, which is much more entertaining. Twixt is just too damn bizarre.

Helcon III is coming! This two-day gaming extravaganza is scheduled for 6.-7.11. this year. I enjoyed last year immensely and expect this year will measure up. For more information, see the event web site (in Finnish, if you can't read it but are interested, ask me for more details).

If you are still hesitating, just read my blog entries for Saturday and Sunday of last year's Helcon.

I'm selling some used games there, too, so if you're interested to buy something, just contact me.

Bruno Faidutti has a new website, The Games of Bruno Faidutti. It's basically what he had before, but there's new stuff and some nice improvements. The layout isn't optimal, it seems to be a bit too wide, but at least the content is good. It's good to see Faidutti producing new game reviews, that's for sure.

Ok, finally: Finnish Players' Picks 2004 voting is over, votes have been tallied and I can announce the results: Puerto Rico wins, again. Carcassonne is second and catches up, losing only by two votes.

Once again, there's a GeekList of the top games (here's last year's list).

The whole list can be seen at the results page.

Some highlights: St. Petersburg scores seven votes, Ticket to Ride gets ten. Goa gets just three votes. Best new game is Attika with 21 votes. A Game of Thrones, Power Grid and Coloretto do well, too.

The October Games Journal is finally out. There's no doubt about the best article of this issue: it's Dan Bosley's Misadventures in Gaming. I'm so glad to see he's back in action! You can find 19 earlier episodes at Terminal City Gamers article page. They are simply hilarious!

The weekend is over and I finally have time to write about the games I played. The first thing we tried was the game I was most interested about: Fifth Avenue. And yeah, it was interesting. After one game, my initial rating is eight, which is pretty good considering Fifth Avenue's a bit low average rating of 6.5. I think the game deserves better ratings, really.

Why? Because it was fun. There's nice tension - you'd like to get cards so you can buy skyscrapers, but getting cards prevents you from doing something else that's potentially interesting. What comes to the problem of people placing businesses and thus ruining the game, well, that's kind of true. Raija and Ismo placed more businesses than I did, so I suppose it is tempting. I placed perhaps one business during the whole game and dominated the skyscraper scene. That secured my victory, too. We all got the first skyscraper bonus, but only I got the later ones. Thus, there's an incentive to not place businesses before you have enough bonuses to score the bonuses.

Somehow it felt we did something wrong. There's a huge stack of black cards and we hardly ever got them. We only used the scoring action once, on the first turn. It's very hard to score your own best area and when someone scores about 10 points from an area, there's little temptation for others to score it. Perhaps with less businesses on board areas would score less and thus it would be easier to take the scoring action. I don't know, but we were kind of missing some of the game's potential.

Still it was a fun game and I'm looking forward to play it again. Next time, with new people, I'll probably say something about the business thing. What, I'm not sure yet, but something, because I think the game can be pretty unsatisfying if everyone just plonks down businesses like there's no tomorrow. It is easy to see the temptation, but it's harder to see that placing skyscrapers is in the end the better way to go.

We played some St. Petersburg, too, of course. I won three games of four and lost the one, but that was a downhill fall from the beginning. I kept records for the last game, jotting down the money and VP production for each player in the end of each round. It was interesting: Ismo and I gained money at a similar pace, I had just a bit more than him. I had more VP income than both of them. My mother had better VP income than Ismo, but lower money income than either one of us.

If I get more VP and more money than anybody else, it's no surprise I win. But which is more important, money or victory points? It turned out to be money. Ismo was second, with his large collection of aristocrats. My mother made the mistake of placing down a building in the early game. I'm more and more thinking that the only building you want to place down on the first round is Observatory and that only if you're not first in line for aristocrats.

Another thing was demonstrated several times in the games: one should never play a card in the wrong phase. Taking a trading card to your hand in the trading card phase is a good move. Buying it and playing it right away is practically always a bad move. You don't want to end up in a situation where you can't afford to buy a worker. Never.

We also played two games of Puerto Rico. One was a major victory for me, the other was really a bad job. But hey, that's what you get when you deviate from your basic strategy. Corn screwed me, that's it. I just didn't get the money machine rolling like I did in the first game, in which I just ruled. Even the masters make mistakes sometimes =)

Friday's are slow at work. Thus, I had plenty of time to tally the votes for the Finnish Players' Picks. However, I'm not telling you anything yet, you'll have to wait for another boring day at work before I do the GeekList. All I'm saying that top of the list had both same old hits and surprising newcomers.

The guys at BoardGameGeek have done a radio show. You can download the mp3 from Aldie's GeekJournal, it's about 16 megs and 61 minutes. I wasn't going to listen to it first, but then Iain said it was ok. I got it on my portable mp3 player and listened to it at work while I was collecting books at the storage. It was fun. The dynamic duo of Derk Solko and Scott Alden are indeed quite fun and their guest, Greg Schloesser of IGAs and West Bank Gamers was quite interesting. It sure was nice to hear the voices of such notable gamers.

It's a bit of a trouble to download it and then listen to it, but I reckon it's well worth it. They keep up the pace well and I do hope they give it another go.