April 2005 Archives

I'm contemplating on buying a set of Poker chips. I've got my sights set on two different sets right now, one without numbers and one with numbers. I'm planning to use the chips not only to play Poker, but to replace all unpleasant paper money and miserable plastic chips in other games.

However, I can't make up my mind which would be better. The numbered chips have the benefit of having numbers on them - it's easy to see the value of the chip. The chips without numbers, however, are more pleasant to my eyes. The value of the chips has to be remembered, which is an additional cognitive load on players. Having numberless chips adds flexibility, too - what if a game needs chips for $2, for example?

Any opinions on the matter are most welcome.

Matthew Gray has whipped up a Virtual Board Game Stock Market, where participants can buy shares in Spiel des Jahres nominees, trying to predict which game wins the award. Each share in the winning game pays $100 in the end of the game and player with the most money wins - of course it's possible to gather money by making good trades, even if you miss the winner.

Around the World in 80 Days, Niagara, Manila and Amazonas are currently going for the highest prices. It's an interesting experiment and I'll be curious to see how much money the winner will accumulate.

Latest review on my Finnish site: Bang!

Quick and dirty English review: Bang! is an interesting game, with a solid theme. The underlying mechanics, which have more than little in common with Werewolf are less impressive. I prefer games with more structure and less fun, or else the fun must be more spectacular. More like, say, Spinergy and less like Bang! or Munchkin. I think Bang! is a decent game, but not for me.

Saturday's board game club session continued:

Another game having some buzz about it was Spinergy. We got nine players to play it, which was nice. Spinergy is highly creative party game, where one player spins three words from a device with three word rings that can be spun. Say there's "fly", "hay stack" and "trash". Now the other players are given a task from a card, which describes a situation and a task. One we had in our game was "You're a chef in a one-star restaurant. Last night was a total catastrophe; everything went wrong. Describe what happened." and that's what you need to do. The description, which needs to be written is just few minutes, must fit the task and include the three words.

This is what I wrote: "Cardinal tips over the hay stack, which stuns the soupbearer. Fly arrives in the soup. A trash flyes in Pope's tournedos. A monstrous devastation!" Why so complicated? Because the spinner has come up with three words he expects the other players to use. If you're caught using one of them, the spinner steals your points. For example in this case I was certain the spinner would choose "waiter", thus the "soupbearer" and so on. Of course it's possible to write random surrealist dada poetry to every task and make spinner's task impossible, but anyone who would do that is not welcome to play party games with me.

The tasks vary a lot. There's storytelling, creating jokes, even singing (fortunately those are rare). Not everybody is going to like this much creativity, but those who are able to come up with all this stuff are going to just love Spinergy. I think it might be a bit too demanding to be taken out in any situation like most party games, but with right people it's one of the best.

However, like in many party games, the rules weren't completely usable without resorting to house rules. We played using the correct rules, where you can't use the spinned words in compound words. Unfortunately that doesn't work with Finnish, which is a compounding language unlike English. Many points were lost when a spinned word was used in a compound. That'll be changed in future games. The scoring isn't perfect, either, but in a game like this it isn't that important. Spinners didn't get points often, but that would probably change if a full three-round game was played and spinners would get a better idea of the other players' thought patterns.

What's most important is that we had a blast. The game worked well with nine players, and would be fine with few more. One last note: like Tom Vasel says, I recommend playing with double time. 75 seconds just isn't enough to come up with decent answers. Three minutes is fine, and we even used triple time on one task, which was particularly difficult (creating a light bulb joke).

Labyrinth - Die Schatzjadg is a new game in the Amazing Labyrinth brand. It has little to do with the original game, though - there's a labyrint and it looks about the same. However, this one is a pattern recognition game. I'd say it's Ricochet Robot for kids: quite like it, but easier. It's even too easy for adults. There's also a bit of a guessing problem. Players need to trace their way through a labyrint and call out the number of treasures that can be reached. It's usually fairly small number (four to six or so), so if someone gets it wrong, the best approach is usually to call one less or more.

For kids, it's probably better, but for adults it's not quite hard enough, I think. It fell a bit flat, that's for sure. Maybe using two puzzles at the same time would make it more interesting, I'll have to try that.

Africa is making a comeback: I've played it twice in a fairly short time. That's not bad, because it's a really solid game. Our five-player game had two newbies, who we taught with the best method for this game: tell the minimum needed and add rules for the different tiles when they come up. Africa has a bit too complicated rules when they're laid out in the whole, but given piece by piece it's ok.

Another game with great expectations was In the Shadow of the Emperor. It fulfilled them, indeed. It was quite as meaty as I expected. There are just so many things to take care of: taking over elector seats, the Emperor election, generation management, gaining income... This game will take several playings before I'll figure it all out. But it was fun, that's for sure.

There are lots of cool mechanics. The aging of the barons is interesting, that's for sure. It's fairly easy to extend the lifespan of the barons (and we did see some really old guys stretched out for far too long), but what's more important is to take care of the age structure. It's not fun to lose three or four barons at the same turn, especially if you're getting a girl that turn. Each turn players get one descendant, who is either boy or girl. The action cards you used last turn determine the sex: the cards are pink or blue, and if you have more blue cards, you'll get a boy. There's another layer of decision making there, as both boys and girls have their benefits. Boys are generally better, but the cards that create girls are pretty good, too. Tricky!

Our game saw lots of stability. Everybody got to be the emperor, but the electors were fairly stable. That's not good, because you won't score points for keeping the position - only getting a new elector chosen scores points. Clever idea. It was very much a practise game, that's for sure.

Our game took pretty closely 90 minutes, which is good for a first game. Somebody in the Geek mentioned four-player game taking 270 minutes - what a nightmare! It's just five turns, you know... I don't think it'll get much faster, but 90 minutes is pretty good for a game this complicated. In the Shadow of the Emperor is a real gamer's game, with clever mechanics and untypically authentic and strong theme.

We wanted to play a quick High Society game, but we didn't get that - for the first time I had a full game, where the last doubler was the last card. I lost due to money, Ville had one million more. What a shame.

After a game of Crokinole we played the final game of the evening: a four-player game of Power Grid. It was a good game. I thought I was doing well, but then wasted too much money in the power plant market and when Olli surprised us by connecting his 17th city, I had fuel to power up 12 cities. I was expecting the game to end next turn... My bad, I had a good start which I blew. Olli played his cards well; congratulations are due. It was a good game, even though I lost, and that's what matters in the end.

We had a rather pleasant board game club session yesterday. Since Johanna was away on a cruise with her friends, I played until midnight with the last enthusiasts. It was fun, though a bit too late perhaps to be done on regular basis.

This session report will be in pieces, because there were so many new games and I ended up writing quite a bit about them. That should please you, I hope.

We kicked off the session with a seven-player game of Attribute using my Finnish cards. It makes a world of difference! It was a blast, particularly as I won. We used the BrettSpielWelt scoring, which is slightly more complicated than the basic scoring, but Ilari had commented that with the basic scoring, the red and green sheep cards aren't in balance (reds are better scoring-wise). What's best, I won! We played another game later, which I ruled as well. Both games had tons of laughter and several bizarre word selections.

Attribute is a really good game, and I really wish there was a proper Finnish edition of it. As there isn't one, I can't recommend it full-heartedly to Finnish gamers. Word games just are better with one's first language. For gamers speaking either English or German it's a very good choice.

The new Kramer-Kiesling game Australia got some attention and it wasn't hard to find players for it. We played a five-player game, which is something I probably won't do again. Australia is a very tactical game and in my opinion those tend to work best with smaller number of players. Australia should work ok with four, I believe, as it's fairly quick to play. It shouldn't be prone to analysis paralysis either, as the situations are generally fairly simple.

Even though I'm not terribly keen on very tactical games, Australia was a pleasant experience. It's clearly lighter than the mask trilogy games; players have just two actions each turn and there's often no choice for the first action. Still, it's very much an optimisation puzzle: you go in, do what you can to score points and that's it.

The map of Australia is divided into areas. All have two projects: a conservation project and an industrialisation project. Conservation is done, when all camps around the area are occupied by rangers. Each camp can hold any number of rangers, but only from one player. Industrialisation tile has a number, which is revealed when someone enters the area. If the camps around the area have exactly that many (tiles range from four to nine) rangers, the tile is scored. Scoring is the same in both cases: whoever started the scoring gets three points and then everybody gets one point for each ranger in the camps around the area.

First action of the turn is often used to fly one's plane (the game comes with really pretty plastic planes) to a suitable area. Rangers can only be placed where the plane is. Second action is typically a card: cards depict one to four rangers and zero to three coins. They come in different colours, matching the various areas: to play a card, it needs to be of the right colour. Rangers can be placed on one camp around the area where the plane is. That's it, for most turns. Nothing particularly tricky, but often finding the best spot is not completely obvious (and then again, sometimes it is). Not super light decision-making, but fairly simple.

Money complicates matters. You can either use three dollars to play a wrong-coloured card or four dollars to teleport a ranger on the board. Especially in the end game, when your rangers tend to be tied up on the board, teleporting is golden. You can pick up rangers, but you must fly where the rangers are and spend an action to get them, which is not fun. With five players, having only 10 rangers means you have to manage them well.

We played with advanced rules, which add an windmill on the board. Completed project tiles are placed on a track. When it's full, rangers played on the wind mill track score points - there's a small majority subgame there. Rangers can be placed on the wind mill ranger track instead of playing them on board, when you're in an area near the wind mill. It's one more thing to take care of, as it usually gives good points to one player in the end of the game.

Our game was fun. I won, which has something to do with it. I got a very substantial lead in the midgame, but Nestori caught me. He did the best single turn during the game, scoring about four areas on his turn. Very effective, it was really beautiful move. However, I managed to score more points in the end, eventually winning the game.

Australia is a very dynamic game. You can fly anywhere to take the advantage of a good scoring opportunity. There's very little long term planning; it's what you can do on your turn, and that's it. I like it. The game changes somewhat when the areas are scored and worrying about your useless rangers becomes an issue. Those who enjoy tactical games should like Australia. The grand strategists will be frustrated by the game's one-turn-at-a-time nature, but that's what's expected.

Two new reviews up on the Finnish site: Dos Rios and Trivial Pursuit.

Dos Rios is a brilliant example of a tactical minmax-game action point game. Every turn is a puzzle, where you must find the best way to use the action points you're given to maximise your own score and minimise your opponents' scores. If that's what you enjoy, Dos Rios is a very good game for you. Susan Rozmiarek's review proves that, pretty much. However, I'm more with Shannon Appelcline: the game looks great, the river mechanism is neat and the game is better than average - but nothing else. It's too tactical for me, in the end.

I have only tried the game with three players and I'm apprehensive of trying it with four. Too much chaos, I'm afraid. There's the typical risk of analysis paralysis, but I think that's fairly light compared to some other games (Kramer-Kiesling mask trilogy comes to mind), as the problem space is quite small and there's only six action points to use every turn. With three quick players, however, it's good fun and one of my current favourite three-player games. Everyone should at least try it, because the river and the way you can dam it is neat.

Trivial Pursuit - well, you know Trivial Pursuit. It's interesting how the new edition has made the game quicker: there are less spaces on the board and the roll-again spaces are now teleport-to-scoring-space spaces. There are also less question cards, I think, and they sell additional booster packs. Yeah, right.

However, it's still probably the best general trivia game around. I haven't seen better, at least. The gameplay is very boring, but if you don't like that, just ask the questions. Questions tend to annoy me a bit and they do introduce quite a large random element in the game, as they range from very specific and hard to easy yes or no -guesses. As someone noted in one GeekList on party games, trivia games aren't terribly exciting: you either know the answer or don't. Therefore while I play anything my dear wife likes to play (and Trivial Pursuit does make that list), I'd choose a different party game unless trivia game was especially requested.

I did two BrettSpielWelt sessions today. I tried to recruit folks from Boardgame Society forums, but with no luck. I got some general interest, but nobody joined me.

On my first visit I played seven games of Diamant. It's a new filler game from Alan Moon and Bruno Faidutti. It's a push-your-luck game: players are treasure hunters looking for gems in dangerous caves. Caves are resolved one card at a time; card may contain either diamonds or dangers. There are 15 diamond cards and 3 of each 5 dangers. When a second copy of a danger card shows up, the players must leave the cave without their treasures. Wimping out is always an alternative, of course.

There's also an added bonus for chickening out: if the diamonds on a card can't be divided equally amongst the explorers, the remainder is left on the card. When someone leaves, they get to pick up the leftover gems on their path. Clever, and makes for some tough decisions.

The game takes about five minutes or less in BSW, which is perfect timeframe for a game like it. I'm not so sure about it in real life, when it takes more time.

Next time around I tried some Web of Power. It's been awhile and it shows, I had lost all my touch.

However, I did win a game of Power Grid. It was just great. I was a little behind when I expected the game to end. With some luck in the power plant market (I got a cheap seven-city power plant I needed) I managed to connect 17 cities (with just 3 electros in my pocket after that), expecting my opponents to do the same. You can imagine my relief and excitement when the first opponent got stuck in 16 cities and it got even better when the same happened to the second opponent, too. I won!

I tried King Lui, too - decent implementation, slightly ho-hum game. Bluff was much better with five players, but still not as good as in real life. I lost a quick two-player St. Petersburg game; it was all about aristocrats, once again.

I've wanted to try Attribute after I read Ilari's GeekList about essential games. Finally I got a chance, and got into a seven-player game. I played against six German guys, with a bilingual word set. Guess who was clueless? It was fun, nonetheless, and I had some good moments. I was surprised, when the late Pope wasn't "sinister" like I guessed, but even more surprised when someone described Finland as "Italian" and other player chose that card (a secret card dictates whether you need to match the topic with your attribute or not; you try to pick the cards that match the topic)! What a great game. I created a Finnish version of the game for myself. I'll probably buy the English edition at some point, but a game like this needs to be played in Finnish to be properly enjoyed.

Yesterday brought me long-awaited In the Shadow of the Emperor. So far I've marvelled at the bits and read the rules few times, and I must say I'm quite thrilled. It sure looks like an interesting game, with a particularly heavy doze of theme. It sounds so good in theory I can't wait to see how it turns out in practise. Hopefully I'll find out tomorrow.

The same package contained Farfalia, a five-player trick-taking game. I'm not sure how useful that'll end up to be, as the game is basically five players only, but hey - I thought it had something going for it. At least the game has very interesting partnership structures: dealer plays alone against two partnerships. Partnerships change every round, so everybody ends up being paired up with everyone else. Sounds neat.

Here's the 100th review of my Finnish site: Fresh Fish.

Fresh Fish is a neat game. I like it a lot. It's a tile placement game, but with a twist: rarely is a tile-placement game so focused on the squares where the tiles are not placed!

The goal of the game is to connect one's four shops to the four corresponding production facilities with the shortest possible road. The catch there is the road-building, which is not in the players' hands.

Actually, building is a bit indirect, too. Instead of placing tiles on the board, players place reservations, claiming a property for later building. Players can then draw tiles to place on their reservations. In case of a shop, those are auctioned to take the power from players' hands even more.

The road-building. Yes, the horrible road-building, which without a doubt makes many people shiver in horror (I think I've scarred some). Why is that, one could ask, as the expropriation follows two simple rules: all roads and undeveloped plots must form a single, continuous area and all production facilities and shops must have access to the road. To be honest, while those rules are simple, they produce complex situations. That isn't helped by faulty rules and unclear errata. Even after understanding the concepts, it's just too hard for some people. Brains either are Fresh Fish -compatible or not.

Mine are, and I enjoy the game a lot. It's always a challenge to come up with good plots for shops. Even more interesting is to place buildings so the road takes the best turns and ends up taking opponents' shops far from the production so their fish is far from fresh when it finally reaches the shop.

There are annoying graphic design issues (reservation cubes have bad colours and are tiny, that's number one), but nothing to prevent one from enjoying the game. Learning the rules correctly is not easy, but it's very important. Fresh Fish is a tough game to learn - a group of newbies is almost certainly bound to get something wrong about the expropriation, but if there's an experienced player teaching the game, it's not that hard.

If one's looking for something quite unlike anything else and has a preference for cerebral games, Fresh Fish is the best thing I know.

Here I am, having my breakfast in peace, while the doorbell rings. Who can it be, I wonder, and go and open the door. To my surprise, there's a mail delivery guy with a rather large and hefty box for me. I open it up and what do I find? Australia, Labyrinth - Die Schatzjagd and Spinergy. What a pleasant surprise!

I did expect the games this week, but not on Monday and not delivered to my home. Next board game club session (this Saturday) is going to be a feast of new games, especially as I'm expecting In the Shadow of the Emperor and Farfalia later this week. Oh bliss. I have high expectations for many of these games; I wonder how they'll turn out.

I just created a GeekList of games I consider essential. Enjoy and comment!

It's been a while since my last BrettSpielWelt session. Six months, actually! Well, nothing's changed over there, just a new game or few.

However, playing anything except the standards proved to be pretty hard, as usual. I got in five games of San Juan, with two and three players. The three-player games proved to be my forté, as I won them both. One with rush building, one with City Hall and Palace. One of the two-player games was excitingly close, ending 28-27 as my loss. I can take pride in having three buildings less than my opponent! I've missed playing San Juan, though it's probably more fun in BSW than in real life. It's just too slow with all the cards to mess around. Clicking icons is better.

I wanted to fix the flaw of not playing Puerto Rico this year. Two games, two losses, nothing much to report except a very rusty player. I've forgotten everything I once knew. The first game was particularly horrible.

For the record: Bluff is very bad in BSW with three players, just awful. More players are needed, and the game needs real players, too.

After some waiting, I managed to play a game of Power Grid, that was good. I didn't play well at all (buying two nuclear power plants is silly when there's just one fuel production coming in), but it was a blast anyway. It's such a good game.

I tried my best to get a game of Attribute going, but that proved to be impossible. I never had more than two players in the same room. It's a shame, because I really want to play it. Next board game club will bring a chance, hopefully. The game is begging for a homemade Finnish edition, though. I probably should create one (but if I do so, I'll be sure to buy the original as well, because that's just fair).

A while ago I got a review copy of Cluzzle, which I've now reviewed: review of Cluzzle. In Finnish, as usual.

Cluzzle is a party game, where players sculpt riddles of clay (they're clay puzzles or cluzzles). An ideal riddle is not too hard and not too easy. Everybody creates a cluzzle to start with and then there are three rounds of guessing what the cluzzles represent.

Before each round of guessing there's a round of questions. Questions must be answered yes or no, but some clarification is allowed in case the answers are misleading. There's a bit of a leeway there, but it's not a problem once everyone understand what's allowed in answers and what's not - the game comes with good examples.

A cluzzle guessed on the first round is worth one point both to its creator and the guessers. On the second round, it's two points and on the last round, it's three points. If nobody guesses your cluzzle, it's zero points. Brutal, but necessary. Creating too easy or too hard sculptures is simply too easy.

Sculpting is fun. Clay is forgiving. I'm useless when it comes to drawing, but making clay sculptures is fun and requires less artistic skills, especially when you're not trying to make it too good. What's even better, asking good questions is as important as making good sculptures, if not more.

Cluzzle is a success. There's excitement and tension (mostly in the form of nervous waiting: will they ask me the right question to get the hang of my cluzzle so I can score), fun and hilarity. The topics range from simple and concrete to abstract. How'd you sculpt Germany, really? Each card (and there's plenty of them) has several topics to choose from and some cards even have spaces where you can add your own, if you're not pleased with the topics on the card.

As a party game Cluzzle is highly recommended. I think every game collection should have something light and entertaining for bigger groups of non-gamers who want to play a game, and Cluzzle fits there quite well.

Oh, and the mandatory gamer note: yes, Cluzzle is a direct derivative of Teuber's Barbarossa. I haven't played it, but I've read the rules and some reviews. I can't imagine why anybody would want to play Barbarossa as Cluzzle has everything necessary and nothing extra and Barbarossa just adds clutter.

According to his Geeklist of essential games, Ilari was tempted by an idea of Geeklist of games published in Finnish. I had spare time and was tempted as well, so here it is: Gamer's games published in Finnish. First draft includes 23 games, feel free to add more if you know something I've either forgotten or even don't know of.

I got Settlers of Catan Card Game, so of course I had to try it. Nestori agreed to test it out with me and off we went to Catan. The card game is a two-player version of the board game, necessary because trading really doesn't work with two. As a consequence, there's little player-to-player trading in the card game. Trading happens, but with the ports, like in the game: 3-for-1, 2-for-1 in special occasions.

There are many superficial similarities and even more subtle differences. The card game is actually better, or at least more interesting. It's quite unique as two-player games come, at least I can't come up with other games like it. Most of the game is building, spending resources to create roads, settlements and cities and then adding extension buildings to improve production, allow for more productive trading and so on - well, it actually is quite like San Juan, come to think of it.

However, the decisions are somewhat different and there's a different feel to the games. The building possibilities are severely limited (two extension buildings per settlement, four per city and once you build something, it stays there); being good at everything is not an option. It takes specialization and as usual, requirement for specialization creates interesting tension to the building decisions.

It was a fun game, which ended up as my victory. Even though Nestori got the last settlement (the amount of settlements is odd, which I think is a rather nice design touch), I had three mountains producing ore. I won the game by building four cities and then some buildings. Nestori didn't work hard enough to get points, I think. I'm interested to try the game again, even though it's length (our game took 70 minutes) is a constraint. I also have the German version of the game, which is rather unpractical. However, I'm working on the translation, so that'll be remedied.

As I said earlier, I had the unfortunate opportunity to play Pimp: The Backhanding. Had I known what it was all about, I might've passed it, as I didn't quite enjoy it.

As a game, Pimp's virtues are limited. I think it's fairly typical take that -game. Nothing spectacular here; it's not the worst game in that genre (it's better than Munchkin) but not the best either (that honour goes probably to Chez Geek). I generally don't like the genre, as the games tend to be pretty boring once you've had your fun with the cards. Funny and comical games can be great, but it takes good mechanics, too, and that's quite untypical in funny games.

My problem with Pimp is the theme. Players control a team of pimps, who try to get prostitutes to work for them. First there's a contest over who gets the prostitute: several pimps might try to get the same prostitute and the one who's the sweetest talker (or uses crack to make the prostitute an addict) gets her (or him). After that comes backhanding, which has given the name for the game: players can send their pimps to beat the prostitutes the other players scored, as a prostitute in hospital can't make money. Pimps try to protect their assets, of course, and if they succeed, they socre the money. Repeat three times, most money wins in the end.

I believe in free speech and of course it's possible to make a game on prostitution. That's fine. I don't even want to ban this game (but if I had a game store, I wouldn't carry it). All I'm saying is that I'm quite amazed White Wolf is producing this piece of garbage (technically it's not a White Wolf product, but they are distributing it and involved in it financially).

First of all, I'm not too keen on painting such a nice picture of pimping. "Join the profession so highly regarded for its virtues — become a pimp!" reads in the Geek description. I guess that attempts to be comedy, but if someone can see any virtues in pimping, I suggest they get their head checked.

Second, I don't like a game where beating women to submission is such a central element. For example, and I know it's just a single card, but it displays the game's attitude quite well, there's a card called Community College Application. You can play it on someone else's prostitute. She (or he) wants to go to college and leave the streets. If the pimp can beat her up, she won't go, otherwise she's gone.

Third, it's really the players that offend me more than the game. The game itself is merely a combination of what I think is boring game design, inappropriate theme, sexist and stereotypical imagery and really low-brow sense of humour. However, seeing someone getting quite excited by the game and really getting into and enjoying the role of a ho-beating pimp daddy makes me cringe. If that's someone's idea of having a good time, I don't want to be involved.

Finally, for the record: I'm not a politically over-correct wussy nor do I want to ban all games with violence, sex or drugs in them. Adult themes are fine. Actually, I would like to see more adult themes in games; what's labeled adult these days is more often than not adolescent, not adult. Like Pimp, for example.

I do find it quite annoying how the insults start to fly whenever someone says they think this game (or some other) is inappropriate. It's just too damn easy to go "it's just a game" or "it's just for fun, you politically correct idiot with no sense of humour". I just don't find a game with this kind of attitude towards rather serious social issues funny at all. I don't think this game is going to have much effect at all, if any, on greater scale of things, but the thought of people having fun with this game and seeing nothing wrong in the issues it reinforces still makes me a bit sad.

Ok. I'm off my soap-box now. Go on, get back to playing Pimp to all your hearts content if you wish.

Once again I ventured to Lahti and Peter Munter's board game weekend. After all, I had to go and rescue my sleeping bag I had forgotten there last time. For the record, it didn't survive: Munter's dog (a huge Great Dane, and I'm not talking about Mik Svellov now) had eaten it's storage bag. Munter, being the generous guy he is, made it all up to me.

Because there's no way to sleep properly at the event, I decided to skip Friday and head to Lahti early on Saturday. It was a wise decision. I met Tommy and Reko at Lahti railroad station, as they were paying a visit to Munter's game store Puolenkuun pelit to benefit from the board game weekend sale.

When we got back to Munter's, we dove into Neuland. I've been thinking about the game a lot since I last played it, and it was good to get another go. Now I knew what to do from the start. Reko didn't, and got into lots of trouble at one point. He struggled on valiantly and in the end tied the second place with me as Tommy scored the victory.

My loss was caused by underestimation of the value of the weaponsmith (many major advances in the end require weapons) and one tactical blunder; I should've occupied a weaver, but I didn't. That one move probably cost me the game, had I any chance of winning. Nonetheless, it was fun. Neuland is a good game and I really would like to have it. It's not even that hard, after all. Sure, you'll be totally clueless in your first game, but the mechanics are rather elegant. There are few games that are worth two hours of time like Neuland.

Next up was one of Tommy's favourites, Lost Valley. You should know that Tommy is an avid fisherman and likes to trek around Lapland a lot. I guess Lost Valley strikes a chord with Tommy's inner (and outer) fisherman. Me, I'm not an outdoors kind of guy, unlike my father or my grandparents. Despite that I found Lost Valley quite an enjoyable ride.

Avoiding comparison to Goldland is probably an impossible task here. The games have a lot in common: players carry around useful items, restricted by limited space. Items are used to solve problems that the unknown wilderness presents. However while Goldland is a rather rigid race towards the temple in the corner, Lost Valley offers more freedom of exploration.

Players will probably follow the river towards its source; the fact that movement by the river bank is faster will guarantee it. However, there's always the option to head out in the wild and go look for the precious mountain gold instead of the easy-to-find river gold. Whatever the course, the problems are the same: finding food, getting timber and collecting gold.

Gold can be used to buy useful items that facilitate some action, but there's little room for items. Players can only get two large items, so typically it's either the sieve (for river gold) or dynamite (for mountain gold) and canoe (for moving on the river) or horse (for moving inlands). Specialization is a must. Making that decision is one of the key points of the whole Lost Valley experience.

We played twice. In the first game, Tommy won easily. He also got the second game, but this time it was closer: I collected loads of river gold fast, while he struggled with the lack of forests near his mountain mines (mining gold takes lots of timber). Had I been one turn faster, I would've won. Both games were very pleasant and thanks for the randomly generated maps, very different. The game can take many courses depending on how the map turns out. If you're looking for a clever game with a very solid theme, Lost Valley is a sure bet.

After Lost Valley we played Fresh Fish, one of the two games I had brought with me. I had packed some glass beads with the game and having proper-sized reserve markers really made a difference. All I need is fifth colour of glass beads and I'll toss the teeny-weeny cubes out. Our game was a real newbie fest. I had most experience; I scored 15 points. Tommy had played once in Essen, though he claimed he didn't quite get the hang of the road expropriation there; he scored 9 points. Kimmo and Samu had never even heard of the game; Samu got 1 point and Kimmo got -1. Ouch.

I know I made one big blunder with my fish shop, but the rest of it was just good play from everybody else. Samu in particular got good routes. Kimmo had loads of money left in the end, which was key to his victory.

Choosing the next game was a harder task. We ended up with Pueblo. Our host had a rotating marble cheese plate dedicated for the game, and indeed, being able to turn the game around made a big difference. I played well, I think, managing to place all my pieces on just two levels and hiding them pretty well. Imagine my disappointment, when I lost to Tommy by just one point!

Whatever the result, Pueblo is always fun to play and quite unlike anything else. I should probably try to get the game at some point. It's an interesting challenge, trying to place the odd-shaped pieces, but at the same time the game is very intuitive and easy to teach.

Tommy chose the next game, and picked another recent favourite of his: Einfach Genial. It was such an addictive ride for our two newbies that we played second game right away. I'm proud to say that I, finally, won both games. Second game was particularly close, as the points were spread 10-11-12-13. I think I finally got it: I advanced my own scores well, but also played defensively and spoiled scoring opportunities for others. It took few games to figure that out, but now I have more eye for defensive plays.

Einfach Genial is a solid, good game, but I don't know - I'm in no rush to buy it myself. If I can score a promotional copy, I'll get it, sure. The game's fun, but at the same time it's perhaps a tad dry or something. I know Tommy's very excited about the game (it's one of his few 10's at the Geek), but for me it's just one of the good, solid games.

Our last game before Tommy had to leave (he and Reko left around midnight on Saturday, after arriving on Friday and having practically no sleep since - a wise move, if you ask me) was Attika, another 10 for Tommy. It was an exciting match, though I was out of the game fairly soon, trapped in a bad location. In the end it was a very close match between Tommy and Samu; Samu lost, but with one more card it would've been his victory. It was fun to watch, even though I wasn't really involved in the epic struggle for the first place.

The second game I had brought with me was Intrige. I thought I could find a crowd suited for this nasty game and yeah, I did. It went down quite well, with heavy bribing going on all the time. I was second to last, so I'm quite sure I'm doing something wrong. Perhaps I'm not bribing enough? I mean the other guys wasted a lot of money in their bribes and there's no way they got it all back in their salaries; however, I guess I've had a wrong mindset there, as the money is probably recovered in bribes received from other players.

It's an interesting game anyway and it's fun to see how people play it, what kind of alliances and friendship pacts evolve. There was quite little betraying going on, no real backstabs. Just some misleading, not even proper lying.

After submitting myself to torture (a game of Lightning Reaction), I played a match of Gang of Four. It was fun, it's been a while since I last played the game. What's even better, the game was over fairly soon and Munter, who had just started on the roll having won two deals, lost to me thanks to two deals I won. Had the game lasted for deal or two, the situation might've been different. Hooray for me.

After a night of few hours of low-quality sleeping, I was ready for another day. Sundays are usually quiet when it comes to games, but I did play two games. First up was a three-player game of Dos Rios. Since my previous game was such a disaster, I was interested to play the game again. This time it went much better: the game didn't end quite that soon and what's more important, I won.

My victory wasn't obvious, as the game was quite even. I didn't get much wood so I didn't build many dams, unlike Sami, the owner of the game and the other player with previous experience. I had a bit of a struggle with the dams built by the other players, but hey: it's not about building dams, it's about building casas and haciendas, and that's what I did. Most of my success came down to a very good round, where I managed to score 600 pesetas or whatever the currency is in the game. My final lucky break came when Sami took a forest from my control instead of a field (he had a choice of the two) and gave me the 100 I needed to build my last two houses.

Dos Rios is a fun game and the river mechanism is just excellent. I'm still a bit undecided on the chaos of the game. Right now, however, it's one of the more interesting three-player games I have, so it's going nowhere yet. I'm also somewhat curious to try the game with two players. Four - I've already abandoned that, without even trying. It can't be good.

Finally, I played a game of Pimp: The Backhanding. I regret that. I'll write another entry on that pile of rubbish, to keep this entry as a session report. One moralistic rant coming right up, so stay tuned.

It was an interesting weekend. I didn't play many new games - just two, actually - but any chance to play Neuland is a welcome opportunity. Meeting Tommy, Reko and Peter was certainly a pleasure. Thanks to Peter for hosting the event!

Another issue of The Games Journal is out. Stefu's puzzle from last issue was actually the most popular one in the Games Journal's history! This time there's an interesting puzzle, too: it requires matching components from the same game. I got nine without looking at the Geek, so it's a pretty tough one.