January 2005 Archives
Last weekend was the traditional annual games weekend at Tommy's. Third time already! Unfortunately the weekend wasn't quite the success it set out to be, as I fell sick and had to leave. We did get an evening of games on Friday and some games on Saturday and the guys continued until evening, but from what I heard, it wasn't quite the excellent session it has been earlier. Bad luck happens, I guess, but the weekend wasn't a total disaster.
I was the first to arrive on Friday (even before Tommy), so we kicked up the games with some two-player action. Tommy suggested Africa, which was a brilliant suggestion. It was also a rather exciting and close game, which ended in a close victory for Tommy. It was fun to play Africa, it's been a while since I last played it.
Tommy's next suggestion was one of his all-time favourites, Einfach Genial. I like it, too, even though I'm less enthusiastic about it. It was fun to play, even though I lost (though the margin wasn't wide). I'm not good enough in thinking defensively, it seems, I don't know how to prevent opponents from scoring high. Tommy has a better vision about the game so it wasn't a surprise he won.
Stefu joined us, so it was time for serious gaming. Neuland was the first game to hit the table. Tommy had skipped Neuland at Essen but then later regretted that decision and bought the game. I'm glad he did, because the game is great and it would be pity if nobody I knew had it. Since it's a very limited 300-copy print run, it's never going to be very popular.
It's about civilization-building and logistics (not quite unlike Roads and Boats). Players build production facilities, which are then used to product stuff to build civilization advances, which bring in victory points. First player to reach 12 victory points (about four or five advances) wins. The production trees are fairly simple. It all begins at food, which is used to get wood, stone or ore. Ore is made into metal, which can be made into tools or weapons. Wood is needed for building, making paper or coal. It's all fairly simple, but still rather complex when everything is put together.
The game has clever mechanics. I especially enjoyed the action point system. Instead of fixed amount of points, players can spend up to ten points each turn. Each used point moves players pawn forward on a turn track. After player is finished, the turn marker moves on the same track, stopping at the next player pawn it meets. That player gets to move. Players can juggle the turn order to some extent, taking smaller and larger turns when necessary. The system is brilliant, original as far as I know and works really well.
The game was close and exciting. Ugly tactics were seen, mostly blocking the food production and thus preventing other players from using useful infrastructure (players can use all buildings, no matter who built them, but moving raw materials around the board is very expensive). I did do a nice maneuver of stealing silver from Stefu's mines, foiling his plans. In the end we all were within the reach of building the critical advance, but Tommy was basically one turn ahead and that was enough.
Our game took two hours, but the time flew past. It was very involving. The game is probably sweetest with three, at least four players might introduce too much chaos. Don't know, but three seemed nice. It's a heavy game, but at the same time quite logical and easy to figure out. Getting used to the production trees should make the play time go down a bit. I'd like to have the game, but even though PlayMe has it, ordering it doesn't come into question - it's quite expensive (48 euros + shipping is too much), I'm trying to avoid buying games this year (doing all my purchases at Essen, basically) and I'm not quite sure if I playing Neuland would be fun since I'm often playing with the different people and it's a game that benefits a lot from repeated plays. So I guess I'll be happy play it whenever I'm in touch with Tommy's collection, which should happen few times a year and I'll buy it if I come across it.
After a game of DaVinci Code (Stefu hadn't tried it), we dug in to Feudo. The game's owned by our fabulous Boardgame Society, ZuGames was friendly enough to send us a copy to try and introduce to the members. Stefu had arranged it and wanted to try the game, so we gave it a try.
Feudo is a light euro war game, set in 13th century England, where barons fight for territory. Players move their units (infantry, mercenaries and knights), trying to destroy enemy units and occupy towns. Fighting is no-luck (each unit has value, several units can gang up on one, higher value beats the lower value) and thus rather cruel. Each player has ten units, which are out of the game once they are destroyed. That and a ten-turn limit make the game end sooner or later.
There are some clever ideas. Loser gets to choose the turn order. Going first is not that good in movement but very good in battle. Each turn, players choose three units they move using cards and then move them one by one. The semi-simultaneous action is a good idea. Knights are generally the best fighters, but they are useless at occupying towns, so infantrymen and mercenaries are needed. There's also a special piece called Milady, who can charm enemy barons, preventing that player from moving at all. Strategy lesson number one: never leave your baron within Milady striking distance (ie. two areas) from an enemy castle.
Despite these good ideas, I didn't like the game. I felt it was too slow - making progress was too hard. Units move very slowly to the fronts and one mistake may cause them to die very quickly, making all the effort of bringing them out useless. Defending against attacks is impossible, because stacking units is impossible. Large groups of units are only useful in attacking. The rules of the game were also quite a mess, full of exceptions.
All in all, I didn't enjoy the game and won't probably play it again. It was too long (95 minutes) and not fun. If I want a game of battling medieval lords, I'll play Domaine.
Last game on Friday was Old Town, a strange game of historical study. Players try to reconstruct the layout of an old wild west town by adding more and more information to the system until the layout comes through. It's kind of a deduction game, but not really. It's unique and intriguing system and it works quite well.
Players play different kind of cards which restrict the possible location of the different buildings in the town. There might be a card that says the casino was in one of these four positions. Casino tokens are placed on those positions. One casino token is removed from the game as it's useless (the casino is on one of the four position, so the fifth marker is simply not needed anymore) and player scores one point. On a later turn, the same player might play a card pinpointing eight possible positions for the casino - if these two cards intersect on only few positions, player gets to remove casino tokens from the board, scoring one point per token. Thus, points are scored by reducing the uncertainty of the board.
Hopefully my explanation makes sense. The game is hard to explain, but fun to play. There can be nasty lucky swings when someone gets good cards, but that's balanced by the swift play time (just 30 minutes). A re-match is often a good idea, especially as the game's setup takes some time. The outside of the new edition game looks bad, but the components are actually pretty good.
Saturday began with yours truly being sick. At least I can now confirm that Paris Paris is so bad it makes you want to throw up. At least that's happened to me... Well, to be honest, it's not that bad, but my two-player game with Tommy confirmed that I don't like it, either. An late-coming observer might have thought we had a close match, which I won, but no - Tommy was just one lap ahead of me on the scoring track.
It was our second game of For Sale when the impossible happened: I won my first game during the weekend. Yea! With a tie-breaker, even. Great! For Sale, which was new to me, was a rather pleasant experience. I'll be getting the Überplay edition, whenever they may publish it. Meanwhile, I'll stick to my trusty Sticheln deck and some random chips.
After that Tommy suggested Flix Mix and I jumped for the opportunity. Now there's a game I should excel in! The Flix Mix cards have six dots each in six different colours. Players play their cards on table, simultaneously without taking turns, so that each new card played covers and matches at least two dots from an earlier card.
It's pure pattern recognition and quick thinking and I dare to say I'm pretty good at those games. You can imagine my surprise when Stefu beat me pretty badly. In the second round we figured out the key to Stefu's success: cheating... He didn't match dots completely, he thought that only matching the colours was important. So he would play green and blue dot where blue and green dot was needed. No wonder it was so easy. When we restarted our game with all players using the same rules, the situation corrected itself: I won, losing only one round. Stefu wasn't bad, either, he finished both rounds I won with just one card left and won the third round (where I was left with a single card). Tommy, in the other hand, lost sorely.
I knew I'd like Flix Mix and I did. It made it's way on my shopping list. It's an Adlung game, too, so it isn't that expensive. If someone wonders why Flix Mix, when there are other real-time games available, the answer is fairly easy: Flix Mix has a slower pace than many other speed games. It's not as hectic or stressful as, say, Top Speed. Anyway, it's still one of those games were you either have the skill or don't have the skill, but it's not quite as brutal as some other games.
Phil arrived at that point and we started the game that would be my last game before I left. I had done fairly well in the other games and hadn't been too much disturbed by my illness, but now it got worse. I was becoming a bit feverish and let me tell you that is no state to be in when playing Age of Steam! We played the Western USA map, which was interesting. Stefu would've wanted to play Korea, but that would've been bit harsh for Phil, who was a newbie.
I was the only one to start on the rocky west coast, which might've spelled my doom - I lost the game. I did catch up on the other guys, but while I had the income level Phil had, it had come with a higher cost so I wasn't making as much profit. I didn't invest enough in the turn order auction, losing valuable Locomotive actions once or twice. Tommy and Stefu ruled the game, despite Phil's four income on the first turn (he didn't get much income for a while after that). Eventually, Tommy won, while I was dead last. Too bad. The map was ok, but right now I'd probably prefer the original map. The Irish map is superior, of course. I don't have much need to get new maps, as I don't play the game that often, but if there's an interesting map for sale in Essen this year, I'll probably pick it up. The new maps do spice up the game, if the special rules are interesting.
And that's it for the weekend. I had to suffer a bit, as the train I was going to board was 30 minutes late. It wasn't fun, standing in the freezing cold being sick and all that, but I did manage to make it home where my lovely wife nursed me well. I slept some and got better by Sunday. Too bad the weekend was interrupted, but things happen and fortunately there'll be more chances to play good games and hang out with friends. I'll meet Tommy at Lahti in April (hopefully getting a chance to play Neuland again) and play some games already this Saturday.
Brian Bankler writes in his blog about Maharaja and manages to sum up lots of good reasons why not to like the game. Positive feedback is probably one of the worst, when building palaces gets you more money to build more palaces! I'm considering should I even try to make an effort to play the game second time or would that be a complete waste of time...
I tried CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Board Game yesterday with Johanna. We both like the show, but have a healthy suspicion towards licensed games. Most of them suck, that's general knowledge.
Unfortunately CSI isn't one of the good ones. The eight (yeah, just eight) crime stories are good, very much in style of the series. However, it's the game that doesn't function. Well, it does, but in a very boring way. Forget all about deduction, CSI is a roll-and-move race to the different members of Grissom's team. Players must get clue from each department and then do it once again and on the third time, they can either check all the clues or go to Grissom to state their suspicions.
What's even better, players must hit the departments with an exact roll, making sure there's as much pointless die-rolling as possible. We, obviously, ditched that rule immediately. However, that took of most of the tension in the game. That's bad.
The whole system is very messy. There's lots of cards to handle and the whole pointless board. The expansion set can be played without the main set using a special 12-sided die - I have a feeling that might be a better solution.
It's not completely bad. The stories do catch the atmosphere of the show (even if the game doesn't offer any excitement) and people who aren't used to better might not mind the roll-and-move mechanism. However, I don't think I'm going to play the game again. I think I'll just read the cards to enjoy the stories.
Another review on my Finnish site: Dawn Under or Dicke Luft in der Gruft.
Dawn Under is a delightful game of putting vampires to rest before the dawn. The thick, double-layered board has sixty graves covered with headstones made of thick cardboard. Each headstone has one of six colours in it's bottom. Players must find graves that match the colours of their vampires.
As the colours are printed on the bottom of the headstones, the only way to find out is to peek under them. If the colour matches one of two vampires players have in the ends of their vampire rows, the vampire goes in the grave and player gets another go. If the colour doesn't match or the grave is already occupied, turn ends there. The player who runs out of vampires first wins the game.
As you can derive from that description, Dawn Under is a memory game. There's more to it than most memory games (for example, unlike most other memory games, this one gets harder instead of easier towards the end), but the only skill one needs is memory. It is therefore very good game for families, as it's usually the kids who have the advantage when short-term memory is in question. Dawn Under is such a fun game that even experienced gamers should find it interesting. At least the strong memory element is rather unusual.
The game is simple, but there are some interesting complications. Players have stock of three garlic cards, which can be inserted into empty graves with unmatching colour. If player hits garlic, he or she gets a vampire from the player who placed the garlic. Opening an occupied grave scores a stake for the unlucky player. When someone has three stakes, each player gets to give them a vampire. Same happens, when someone opens a grave with their own garlic in it.
There are also rat tiles, allowing players to open several graves. I don't like the rats, as the rules concerning them are an ugly blemish on an otherwise elegant ruleset. I find the rats add very little to the game, but fortunately it's very easy not to use them.
Even though the theme of the game is vampires (a good theme well implemented here), it's perfectly suitable for kids. Game art is very friendly and cartoony and the beautifully thick board is covered with funny little details. The game is fun to play, offering lots of excitement that grows as the game progresses and finding empty graves gets harder and harder. This one's a keeper in my collection and definitely worth trying.
Brian Bankler has a new blog called The Tao of Gaming. The title is familiar to many, as that's also the name of his old website. He has an RSS feed, which unfortunately doesn't have full entries.
His latest entry, Truly, you have a dizzying intellect is a good read.
I reviewed Die Sieben Siegel (in Finnish).
Die Sieben Siegel (The Seven Seals) is a trick-taking game (one of these days I should write an introductory article on trick-taking games, in Finnish). In the Card Games classified index it would probably be in the exact bidding group (Spades is not in that group, but is similar and well-known). Players are expected to predict the exact number of tricks they win. That's typical, but in Die Sieben Siegel players must also predict the suit of the tricks won.
That's an interesting challenge. It also means that you can forget what is generally considered as a good hand in most trick-taking games. Sure, the way you score tricks by using big cards and trumps is all very typical, but it has little to do with scoring. The number of tricks you make is irrelevant. Keeping the prediction is what counts.
One player has an option to be a saboteur. Saboteur doesn't make a prediction, but tries to foil the plans for the other players. Player who chooses saboteur has to pay a fixed value of four penalty points, which can be reduced by forcing other players to take tricks they didn't predict.
Die Sieben Siegel works with three, four or five. With three, players seem to collect lots of penalty points and saboteur is an easy choice with any cards. With more players, there's more room for skillful play and a good player can steadily avoid penalties. There choosing saboteur is more dependent on cards one gets. The game is good with any number, but best with four or five in my opinion. I have only played once with three, so there's a grain of salt for taking.
Cards feature five suits with 1-15 in each. The art is decent and functional, though I don't like the colour of the backs (too fuchsia). It's easy to tell numbers and suits apart. The cardstock isn't top quality, the cards are hard and shiny instead of nicer finish. Fortunately it's easy to replace them with a Sticheln deck, if necessary. The seals and saboteur tokens are okay.
I find Die Sieben Siegel interesting and unique enough to hold interest. Fans of trick-taking games should at least try it (easy to do with a generic five-suit deck and some tokens, the rules can be found at Geek). It's not a must-have game by any measure, but it certainly has it's place in my collection.
Last weekend in Jyväskylä was good gaming time. As usual, I brought a bunch on games we played a lot. It's refreshingly different, playing the same games over and over again instead of playing a variety of games just once or twice. I won't bother with detailed session reports, but here's a rundown of the games we played.
St. Petersburg was a must. I had given it as a Christmas gift and it had been played a lot: every day during the Christmas holidays! We played twice and I couldn't win either game. Both games were won by the heaviest concentration of nobles and to be honest, I'm starting to think the strategies are a bit one-sided: most aristocrats usually wins. It's a race to get most different aristocrats, and that's getting a bit boring. Of course it's not possible to forget buildings (and with in a difference of aristocrat or at most two, games are won or lost by the buildings), but still - aristocrats are too important.
Attika - last time I played Attika was in May! It was about time and the return to Greece was great fun. It's a lovely game, and I should probably make an effort to play it more.
Geschenkt was a success, as I predicted. Not a huge success like 6 Nimmt!, but they did buy the game from me.
DaVinci Code was another Christmas gift. I played three quick two-player games with my mother, wanting to see how the game works that way. It doesn't - it isn't a particulary good two-player game.
Mogul is quick and nasty and has a clever bidding mechanism. My kind of game, that is! I like it, even though it didn't do that well with others. There's increasing tension as the inevitable crash is coming and the bidding system is wicked. It's another really good filler game.
Dawn Under was really well-liked. Even my brother stayed around after dinner to try it - and that's something I've never seen! Must've been the vampires, as he's a huge fan of White Wolf Vampire games (except the RPG). It was great fun, trying to find places to rest in. Some were better in it than others - my brother didn't succeed at all, while Ismo won several games and did well in others. All had a blast with the game.
One thing I learned: the rats are stupid. In early game, they are a boring bonus as the graves are mostly empty. In any point of the game, they break the flow of the game. Toss them out, that's my opinion! We also found out that the game scales well, as we played with all numbers from three to six. There's one caveat: end game can be unsatisfying. When someone has only one vampire, the game usually ends when someone else makes a mistake. It didn't bother me, but if the player with the one vampire only opens graves he knows are empty and thus avoids mistakes, it can be annoying. But then again, that isn't so easy...
Die Sieben Siegel was, however, the biggest hit of the weekend. I first thought the game would be too difficult for the smaller boys, but that turned out to be wrong. In fact, in our first two games, younger, Severi, collected just six penalty points, winning both games hands down. Meanwhile I, for example, collected 27 points in the same ten hands. Ouch.
Right now Die Sieben Siegel is one of the better trick-taking games in my opinion. The concept of good and bad cards is rather fluid, as the goal is not to collect lots of tricks but to predict exactly which tricks you take (amount and suit). Hand full of very good cards is actually quite tricky, there's more room for mistakes.
There's been lots of discussion about the saboteur. Instead of predicting tricks, one player can be saboteur, trying to prevent others from scoring. Saboteur gets four points, which are reduced by every black seal (unwanted trick) taken by other players. If saboteur takes lots of tricks, others will take penalty points for overpredicting, but so will saboteur. Saboteur needs to take as few tricks as possible, making other players take more tricks than they predicted. But that's tricky!
In any case, saboteur is far from being the obvious choice like some people have complained. Reducing the penalty points isn't trivial, while scoring zero can be easy with good cards. However, when we played with just three players, saboteur became the obvious choice as the penalties leapt up (winner of our six-hand game had 17 points). In three-player games, saboteur could be worth five points. With more, it's not necessary. In any case, I think Die Sieben Siegel is best with four or five players.
It was a good weekend, games and all (tasting a madeira wine from 1980 - the year I was born - was also rather interesting - it had a pleasant and refined taste, just like me). Next weekend is another games weekend, this time at Tommy and Laura (like last year or the year before). It should be different kind of weekend, with lots of new games and only one or two games of each title.
A comprehensive study of the connection game genre, Connection Games provides a survey of known connection games while exploring common themes and strategies. This book aims to impose some structure on this increasingly large family of games, and to define exactly what constitutes a connection game. Key games are examined in detail and complete rules for over 200 connection games and variants are provided.
A connection game is a board game in which players vie to develop or complete a specific type of connection with their pieces. This might involve forming a path between two or more goals, completing a closed loop, or gathering all pieces together into a single connected group.
Connection Games: Variations on a Theme
I broke my trend of starting the year with an Asian game and played Dawn Under with Johanna. I got some childish games recently, you know, with Niagara completing the set (I also got CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Boardgame, but that's another story).
Dawn Under is a childish memory game about vampires trying to seek shelter for the day. Vampires are of six colours and there are enough graves for everybody. However, players must find the right graves by looking at each, one at the time. Pick a correct-coloured grave and you'll get to put one of your vampires to rest. If the colours won't match, player gets to boobytrap the grave with garlic. If the grave was already in use, player gets a penalty of a stake - three stakes means you'll get a vampire from each other player, which is a nasty sting.
What makes Dawn Under so exciting is the fact that you can't tell used and free graves apart. The cool board is very thick, made of two layers, and there's a small hole under each gravestone. Nice idea and it works really well. When the game draws to it's end and someone is running out of vampires, it gets really exciting as the risk of making a mistake and choosing a grave with someone in it grows higher.
I really like the game. It's not that good with two - I wouldn't play with someone else than Johanna, as there are plenty of better two-player games - but should be better with more. We'll see about that next weekend, I guess. Don't be afraid of the memory aspect: while the game should be very good for kids, it's also fun for grownups because it's so much more than your average memory game.
Mark Johnson's Games Played in 2004 is an interesting year-end report. I just might use his format next year, if I remember to take a look at it before I start doing mine.
The book is also about Marion Tinsley, who was the best Checkers player ever. Actually, his supremacy is so vast that there are probably very few players in any sport that can compete with his dominance. Between 1951 and 1995 (when he passed away), Tinsley lost just five games. Five games, and he must've played hundreds of games. He was simply unbeatable. Even Chinook couldn't beat him - it would've, though, had Tinsley lived longer. Forget Kasparov, Tinsley's my new game-playing hero.
These days Checkers computers beat human grand masters. Checkers is still not solved, though. Makers of Chinook have computed all board positions with up to 10 pieces on board, but there's still way to go, as the game starts with 24 pieces on board. There's an estimate that Checkers will be solved by 2010. It will happen, as computing power continues to grow in rapid pace.
The book is highly recommended, especially for those interested in Checkers or game AIs. The book can be enjoyed without extensive knowledge on either topic, but of course familiriaty with Checkers or the quirks of computer programming makes the book even more interesting. (One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers
Yet another rules translation, this time it's Mogul, Michael Schacht's clever little auction game (Mogul at Geek). I'm looking forward to trying it this weekend. It sure looks like a fun little game. The Finnish translation is a bit useless, because there aren't probably many copies in Finland, it being such a small print run and all, but hey, it's a small effort, and I like reading Finnish rules.
I finally got around reading Lewis Pulsipher's (designer of Britannia) article on changes in the boardgame hobby. It's a good read and has some pretty good points, too.
Many people who prefer complex games have moved to computer games
is an obvious one in my opinion: I can't see why I should waste time crunching numbers when there are computers to do that for me.
Rules had better be pretty simple, so that the one person who does read them can comprehend them, because they may not put much effort into it.
That's funny, how people don't generally read rules. Most board games are going to be tough to learn if nobody has read the rules in advance. There was at least one game "review" where games were dismissed as too complicated, yet it was obvious that the people who tried the games hadn't spent any effort to learn them. Playing Puerto Rico without having anyone read the rules in advance? Suicide, but that's what people do. After all, I never read manuals for console games unless there's some trouble (and boy, was I surprised when Sid Meier's Pirates! came with a 100-page booklet! How old school!).
We are also seeing the effects of the "cult of the new".
True. I'm driven by it and I know others who feel it even stronger. New games are better than the old ones. At the same you feel the guilt for not playing the good old games. Of course, many games are so shallow that they last for their time and then you need to move on to new challenges, but there are plenty of games that would improve if one played them more and that's just not going to happen unless the flow of new games stops. I've been thinking about something that would make me stop getting new games (having a baby and thus less time for games might have that effect), and would that be a good thing, too, if I concentrated on playing older games more?
Much of what I've been talking about above can be seen when people describe differences between generations.
Yeah, sure. I don't recognise myself in Pulsipher's Gen Y even though I fit the age bracket, but perhaps that's the reason why I can't feel the love for older, heavier games. Iain isn't much older than I am, yet he's way more enthralled by those long and heavy 80's kind of games. Perhaps my Gen Y qualities come up in my taste of games, as I love nothing like quick and intense games. Keep it short and it's fun.
(via Rozmiarek Games Page)
A sure sign of me getting new card games: new translations. I wrote a Finnish translation of the rules of Dorra's Die Sieben Siegel. It looks like a fun game and it's fairly high on my list of games I haven't tried yet but sure would love to.
Also noted is the appearance of Spiel : Boardgames in the UK, a new blog which looks promising (but ugly - there's just something about the WordPress default font I can't stand - fortunately I don't have to mind, as I read through Bloglines).
Finnish Boardgame Society website is up and running. Right now it's a bit light on information - it has all the basics (how to join, what are the immense benefits of joining) but nothing fancy, like information in English. It does have a message board, where we'll hopefully have lots of interesting board game -related discussion. Right now I'm just very glad we got this thing running and can start recruiting members and see where that takes us. Hopefully further than with the old Finnish Diplomacy Association!
The first 2005 issue of The Games Journal is out. The best article is without a doubt Dave Shapiro's review of Gang of Four.
Another year gone, another report of year's activities. Once more, there's probably more information than anyone wants to know, but it's more for me anyway.
Once again I played more than 100 different games - 113 to be precise. That's less than last year, but then again, I played overall less games this year.
Numbers in parentheses refer to last year.
Total number of games played: 382 (557 last year)
Different games played: 113 (124)
Games I played first time this year: 65 (80)
Best game released in 2004:
St. Petersburg. Simply put, it's my kind of game. I just loved it. I know it'll wear off and next year I'll be playing it a lot less (I don't think it has the staying power of Puerto Rico), but still, it was the highlight of the year.
Best game I played the first time in 2004:
Here comes the challenge, then. Best new card game was Geschenkt. It's light, but great fun. Power Grid deserves a mention as a representative of the heavier end.
Best classic I played the first time in 2004:
Oh, a new category! Intrige scores this one this year. Last year the winner would've been Mü & Mehr, I guess.
Worst game of 2004:
Biggest waste of time in 2004 was Aquarius. It's nothing like last year's Time Control, but still a pretty bad game. Well, not a bad game, perhaps, but just not compatible with me.
Prettiest game in 2004:
Niagara, by far. The set-up of the board, the glimmering gems, just brilliant. Zoch has done neat stuff before (Villa Paletti, for example), but Niagara is the best.
Exactly what I was waiting for:
Fresh Fish. Mindbending, difficult and rewarding, like the I expected.
Biggest disappointment:
Maharaja. It's not a bad game, but I've played it just once and I've never had a strong need to play it again. Given the expectations, this was a disappointment.
Then the numbers. First let's start with 10's and 5's lists. Second number notes how many games I played last year or "new" if I hadn't played the game before.
50's:
Go (63/101)
10's:
St. Petersburg (34/new)
San Juan (30/new)
Attika (12/7)
Crokinole (12/20)
Geschenkt (11/new)
Gang of Four (10/6)
5's:
Huutopussi (7/new)
Ticket to Ride (7/new)
Ta Yü (6/4)
Tom Tube (6/5)
DaVinci Code (5/new)
Power Grid (5/new)
Finstere Flure (5/4)
Flaschenteufel (5/2)
Lord of the Rings: Confrontation (5/13)
Puerto Rico (5/12)
Many new games, but that's my nature. Lots of big losers, like Lost Cities (30->3), Coloretto (25->2), Sunda to Sahul (17->0), Battle Line (18->2), King Lui (15->0), Mamma Mia! (11->0), Sticheln (13->4), PitchCar (9->0) and so on. Some of these were replaced with new games (and with games like Coloretto or King Lui, that's just natural evolution and I'm not really sorry), some require difficult circumstances (Sunda to Sahul is a very good game that's difficult to play), some had numbers inflated by some random reason last year.
And then again, my time was taken by the good, new games I like. After all, had I not played 30 games of San Juan, there might've been some time for Mamma Mia! - but am I sorry? No way!
Happiness product (games x rating x length):
1. Go (79/153)
2. St. Petersburg (77/new)
3. San Juan (35/new)
4. Gang of Four (26/21)
4. Power Grid (26/new)
6. Hammer of the Scots (23/6)
7. Attika (20/12)
8. Die Macher (18/54)
9. Age of Steam (18/26)
10. Puerto Rico (15/36)
Go wins the pot here once again, but it is the game I play most. Longer games make a strong appearance (Hammer of the Scots, Die Macher, Power Grid, Age of Steam).
Matthew Gray's month metric:
1. Crokinole (7/2)
2. Go (5/8)
2. St. Petersburg (5/new)
4. San Juan (4/new)
4. Hammer of the Scots (4/1)
4. Attika (4/3)
4. Puerto Rico (4/5)
4. Huutopussi (4/new)
4. Sticheln (4/6)
4. Finstere Flure (4/2)
Surprisingly Go lost to Crokinole. Then again, I didn't have the weekly Go matches I used to have last year. These were my staple games last year, pretty much.
2 players:
1. Go (62/101)
2. San Juan (17/new)
3. St. Petersburg (9/new)
4. Tom Tube (6/5)
5. Ta Yü (6/4)
Go wins, no surprises there, but it is interesting to see the two big ones appear on this list as well. Those games are mostly BSW, I think. Last year I predicted Tom Tube might reach the list, and that is indeed the case. If I counted PBEM games, StreetSoccer would be second on the list.
3 players:
1. San Juan (9/new)
2. St. Petersburg (7/new)
3. Attika (7/2)
3. Huutopussi (7/new)
5. Puerto Rico (4/6)
Once again the big ones top the list and once more San Juan is before St. Pete. Other three-player games are interesting and what's notable is that Sticheln is missing.
4 players:
1. St. Petersburg (18/new)
2. Crokinole (10/9)
3. Gang of Four (8/1)
4. San Juan (4/new)
5. Attika (3/new)
5. Flaschenteufel (3/new)
5. Loopin' Louie (3/new)
Now here's St. Pete's triumph. Crokinole makes an expected showing and Gang of Four fits the bill perfectly as well.
5 players:
1. Geschenkt (7/new)
2. Finstere Flure (2/1)
2. Niagara (2/new)
Looks like I didn't play much five-player games this year, then.
