November 2005 Archives

Yehuda wrote an article called The Designer's Rules in the Gone Gaming blog. Go read it, as it was both funny and educating!

And God said, "Let there be choice!" And there was choice, and each player now had two pawns, such that when they flipped a card, that player had to choose which pawn to move. And God saw that Candyland was now suitable for creatures with greater than low-grade intelligence.

Another top-notch pair of blog entries can be found on Rick's blog: first The Deal, and the Pilgrimage of Die Macher and then Rick's first Die Macher session report. Excellent writing!

I came up with a simple game idea today; it was so simple I didn't even need to write up the rules to try it. It was fun, and definitely something I'll develop a bit more. It does have a good pedigree, since the idea is very much based on Fresh Fish and Alien City. My game, which is for some unknown reason about a little piggy going out to town, is a lot more simple than either of those.

The first game did leave me quite encouraged, so I'll work on it a bit more. Johanna enjoyed it too, even though she had some criticism, too. Now I'll just have to think about it, make some changes and try again. At some point I'll let someone else try it, too - volunteers with a Fresh Fish set (that's the easiest way to play it) can step up. I'd especially appreciate someone with kids, since that's the likely target group.

Everybody and their brother already blogged this, but hey, I've got a personal interest in it: Rick Thornquist is back, reporting board game news! This time it's through his own site, Boardgame News. The site features a wide array of columnists and reporters, providing readers with regular columns and news from around the world. Here's my part; I'm their Finnish correspondent.

So, everybody who's been waiting for Gamewire to return, it's here, and it's even better than before!

There's a review of Cosmic Eidex up at the Finnish site.

Cosmic Eidex is a trick-taking game for three players. It's not the easiest game to learn, particularly for players with no earlier experience of Central European trick-taking games. It's based on Swiss Jass (and few other games), which brings some peculiarities to the fold.

First of all, the game is played on a short deck. Suits range from sixes to aces. It's a regular deck, except the suits are different, but that's just flavour. It's a Ace-Ten type of game, which means the cards have different point values and aces and tens are the most valuable cards.

The goal of the game is gain game points. In each deal, there are two points up for grab. One goes for the player with the lowest total of card points and the other goes to the player with the highest total, provided he or she is under or at 100 points. If the top scorer goes over 100, the point is awarded to the middle player. If somebody wins all the tricks, they get both points.

This is all good and well. Since you get points by taking tricks or avoiding tricks, there's always an possibility to play a good round, despite your cards. You'll just have to make up your mind and also react to what the other players are doing.

The thing that's cosmic about this game is the special powers. Each card has a special power, ranging from small changes to game-altering revolutions. Each player gets one in the beginning of the game. Most of the effects can be used once a deal. These bring lots of life and colour to the game.

The special powers are in a good enough balance. Some are way bigger than the the others, but I don't think any are completely useless or total killers. Besides, it's easy to skip annoying powers (like I do with Quizmaster).

Cosmic Eidex is definitely one of my favourite trick-taking games. On the negative side, it can pretty hard to play: it takes three players, no more, no less, and those three should be familiar with trick-taking games, otherwise it'll be a pain to learn.

Also, the cards are bit busy (even though I really love the art) and not quite as functional as they could be. Their quality is superb, though. However, as the game is very cheap (typically around three euros), I'm not complaining: Cosmic Eidex has by far the best quality/price ratio in my collection.

If the idea of trick-taking game with balanced hands sounds good, but Cosmic Eidex sounds too geeky or quirky, I recommend checking out Die Sieben Siegel, which is easier and more flexible.

As long as we're linking is a big list of board game blogs. I picked several new ones on my Bloglines lists. Thanks, Yehuda!

Iain challenged me for a game of Alien City (the Piecepack Wiki page has rules) at Super Duper Games.

Alien City is a close relative of Fresh Fish (and as a result, Fresh Fish suddenly feels a lot less unique). In both games, a road network forms on the board as a result of players' moves and constricts future moves. The goals are similar, as well - try to connect certain buildings with each other.

In Alien City, you're trying to connect towers to domes and towers of different colours within two steps on the road. That score is multiplied by the distance to the nearest tower of same colour. Of course, Iain spoiled my towers by building same-coloured towers next to them, while at the same time building his towers up to 26 spaces away from the nearest towers. No surprise, then, that he crushed me.

It's a mind-bending game. I like it a lot. It makes me feel like owning an Icehouse set would be a good move. I'll take one or two challenges on Super Duper Games, if anybody's interested to try the game.

Yesterday's board game club session - first and last for me this season, unfortunately - was quite nice. Some new folks, some good games.

I started with a quick match of Blockster with Laura. It's a simple game, played with a bunch of rectangular plastic pieces. Players build a tower. Each turn they draw a card, which tells them what to add on top of the tower. Usually it's a piece or two, but you might be forced to drop something on top of the tower or insert a piece in the middle.

The pieces are very light, so the tower is likely to tumble down each turn. There's also a sand timer - if the sand runs out on your turn, you lose. The sand timer is very short and there's no reason for player one to spend 58 seconds to place the first piece and leave two seconds for the next player. That's just silly. We ditched the timer right away.

I don't know - the idea seems fun, but the game doesn't work too smooth. There are cards you can't even use (like the insertion tiles or even regular placement), if the circumstances aren't right. That's just clumsy. I'd say forget this; if you want a tower-making game, get Make'n'Break.

We also played a warm-up game of Heckmeck, which I ended up speeding up, eliminating high tiles on every failed roll. It sure is fun, but if there's better games to play, it feels like a waste of time to me. The game drags too much.

Next up: Antike. We played a four-player match on the Asian side. I got Persians. I won the game, but with a narrow margin: Erkka was just behind me at eight points. Sorn had six and Mika had three. Sorn caught up in the end, but I think Mika didn't quite figure out the scoring. He had a decent empire, but no drive for points. I, on the other hand, was totally concentrated on points.

My strategy was to go for iron, build armies and get lots of cities. That's what I did. My first two points were two kings, as my kingdom soon expanded to ten cities. That got me thinking of further sources for points. I had focused on iron, and wanted to add another resource, so I built few gold cities. I kind of forgot marble, thinking that concentrating on two resources would be a good idea. I could always get marble from coins.

That worked well. My next two points were from science: markets and wheel. I used the power of wheel to conquer a city from Sorn to get fifteen cities and the third king. Four points to go! Seeing that kings were all gone, I didn't have access to seas (Sorn had seven fleets on the Red Sea, I didn't have access to the Mediterranean), there were really no temples to burn, I had two options. I got some gold and bought, on the same turn, monarchy and democracy. That was welcome, since Sorn was building too many armies for me to be comfortable.

Sorn was talking about stopping me (a good idea, but way late) and was amassing marble to stop me from getting temple points (even better idea). I had to rush, so I worked a bit on marble production and got myself three temples to score a citizen before Sorn built all the temples (he had enough marble to build seven temples, when there were five left).

Now I was one point from victory, but so was Erkka. However, Erkka was out of resources, while I had some gold. I was thus able to score the final civilization advance for my ninth point. Man, that was a great game. I really enjoyed it, and it went fast, too (I didn't time it, though, but it didn't take long).

A game of Fettnapf was played to pass some time, while waiting for another game to end. It's still great, even after 15 plays.

Then, the big one: Caylus. There was five of us, but the game took only two hours and fifteen minutes or so. That was good. We didn't spend too much time resolving the worker placements, that's one thing to speed up the game. It's rarely necessary to go through the workers one by one.

It was a blast. The five-player game is different from three-player game, but not much. The resources are more limited and the competition is more fierce, but the basic idea is the same. It was curious, though, to see the tournament field unused, most of the time, when it was used all the time in our three-player games. Money felt tighter, as well, and the turn order changed a lot more.

It was all very interesting. I dragged a bit behind, until I built the 25-point monument. In the end, I was quite sure I'd win, when I landed at 69 points. Ilari had 54, Tero 53 (and that after trying to build a monument without a house; that was an unfortunate mistake, but it did prevent everyone else from using the architect and thus was still a good move in the end), Erkka 39... but Olli leaped to 70 points with his gold and deniers.

The game got pretty good feedback, I think. Ilari said it was good, but not as good as Puerto Rico. The game was seen as complicated and not as clean a design. I kind of agree. It's a complicated game, and a tad too long to be really good. Still, I think there's potential for a rating of ten; right now Caylus is a very easy nine. The news of the Finnish edition (coming in January) got very excited response.

Ilari was interested to try Blue Moon with me, so we did. I played Hoax, he chose Khind. In the end, he kicked my butt. It was very close, the final battle did it - one point of power more and I would've had a chance, but no. What's more annoying is the fact that even one point more for Ilari would've rescued me...

After two games Blue Moon feels ok. I still need more experience to form my final opinion. The different decks are certainly different enough. The tactics seem intriguing, kind of. I want to play more, that's always good.

To wrap it up, I played few rounds of Turbo Taxi with Ilari, winning him hands down. I did make sure Olli was playing something else this time...

Since everybody's counting their geek score, here's mine: 75 played + 36 owned = 111 points. That's, of course, of the The One Hundred games. I consider my played games count pretty good - there's a bunch of games on the list I don't care about - and even my owned game count is ok, the amount of games on the list I would like to own is not big.

In general the list is quite interesting. As someone noted, the top 50 is the good stuff (and of those, I've played 44 and own 23), the bottom 50 is more varied. I hope they do another list sometime (and invite me, too), as watching the results unfold was interesting and the list provoked lots of discussion.

Parents of small children, note: Lahjalinna sells HABA board games in Finland. The HABA area at the Essen fair looked absolutely gorgeous. I know when we get kids, I must get some of those games.

My entry on DVD Sudoku puzzled Alfred in one his Best of Blogosphere reports (I'm seeing my entries mentioned often enough, by the way - thanks for that, Alfred). So, maybe I should give more details, now that I was able to try the game?

The box contains a board, 81 cardboard tiles, two-page rules and the DVD. Both tiles and the board are double-sided: one side has the traditional numbers, the other has Japanese symbols. The look pretty, but the colours on the tiles and on the TV screen don't match 100%. I much prefer the numbers.

The DVD is used to time the game. All the puzzles are also on the DVD. So, when you want to play, you put in the DVD, choose mode (either regular sudoku or the speed game), choose which side of the board you want and select the number of players.

When you play, players must start and end their turns with the DVD remote, as the system works as a clock. In the end, the player who spent least time pondering his or her turns wins the game (this is a victory condition I'd like to see in other games, like Tikal).

That's pretty nice. The use of DVD as a multiplayer clock is a good idea, and works as a scoring mechanism nicely. As a single-player sudoku device, it's quite pointless. No reason to buy this; the pen-and-paper puzzles you can print out free from Internet (Web Sudoku, for example) are better. However, since I now have the game, I could use it to solve a sudoku, if I was at home and had enough time to solve the whole puzzle - I wouldn't bother with the DVD, I'd take the puzzle from my mobile phone sudoku, for example. The board and the tiles are definitely better interface than the mobile phone; put against pen and paper, it's a question of taste.

I'm looking forward to trying the multiplayer games. They seem interesting, but there's definitely going to be trouble, if all players aren't on the same level. But that's not new problem to anyone who's ever played a puzzle board game...

Iain challenged me to play Alien City on Super Duper Games. It's a neat game, which I'll write about when I finish the game.

However, I also got a challenge to play Byte from the game's designer. I was surprised to know I had played one of his earlier designs as well (Tanbo).

Byte is played on a checkers board. Players move pieces, forming stacks. When a stack of eight is formed, the player who owns the top piece scores a point. 24 pieces make three stacks: the player with two points wins the game. You can move pieces between stacks, if you can move your own piece (and everything on top of it) to an adjacent stack so that the piece you are moving moves higher and stack stays below nine pieces.

I though Byte was a bit dry and boring. I guess I'd like it better played face-to-face, and I do confess I hadn't understood the rules completely. Still, it wasn't too much fun. It would take more effort to figure out the game so I would enjoy it, and it doesn't feel worth the effort.

Still, for fans of dry abstract games, Byte is worth checking out. Go see the Byte homepage, which has rules and FAQs. At least the designer doesn't lack ambition, let me quote from the FAQ:

Byte fills a huge void. Before Byte there was a vast oversupply of Checkers sets. And a total absence of high quality games to play on them. Byte has unbridled ambition. I believe it will surpass Reversi in popularity within ten years.

Let me say I'll doubt that, but hey, more power for Mark Steere if that really happens.

I have seen the future of board games and it looks... interesting? Well, not actually - I just got a copy of Tactic's DVD Sudoku and I just opened the box and punched the tiles, I haven't tried it yet. But it certainly looks interesting.

The gist of the game is solving sudokus (well, yeah), in one of two modes. In the first mode you're doing a sudoku together; everybody takes a turn to solve a number. The DVD takes time and the player who spent least time will win. The other mode is a speed game, where players put tiles on board wherever they fit - the game ends, when the puzzle is either solved or becomes unsolvable. That's an interesting take on sudokus!

Well, I'll have to try it. Since Johanna isn't big on sudokus, I'll probably try it just by myself and wait until I go to Jyväskylä next time. Ismo is a big sudoku fan and actually currently on the second round of Finnish sudoku championships (that is, amongst 300 best solvers).

Another Tactic game I got was Blockster, a quick block game where players must add blocks to a rising tower. It's a very small game, it fits in a small cloth bag. It's also pretty tricky.

It's kind of like a pocket version of Monumento. Somehow the big wooden blocks are better than small plastic blocks, but hey, Blockster seems like a fun little game, too.

Milan-Spiele was fast! Well, GLS was. The package was sent from Germany Friday, and it came yesterday. Of course, GLS didn't care to contact me before delivering the package, but fortunately Johanna was home. I don't mind, since it would've been a pain to carry a big box like that from post office.

So, I got my Age of Steam Expansion #2, and now I have all the official Warfrog expansions. I'm starting a mission: I want to play them all before June 2006. Western US is done, as is Ireland, but I haven't played the rest of them. Better start working!

After meddling with the colours and the looks at Lautapelaaja.net, I kind of realised this blog looks pretty boring. I mean, just one colour and black and white. More colours! EasyRGB Color harmonies tool gave me some blues and purples and I ended up with this. How do you like the new style?

I got my first taste of Blue Moon yesterday. I got my set, and just had to give it a go. I've been somewhat interested in the game for a while now, and when I saw it sold at the Board Game Society forum, I bought it right away. The set included also few expansions (Terrah, Khind, Flit and Mimix).

So, we played Hoax vs Vulca with Johanna. She took Vulca, I took Hoax; I like the wrinkly old men and their machinations. She won, but it was very much an introductory game. Johanna didn't like the game much; I kind of expected that, but wanted to try it anyway. She was a bit of confused, really - she commented that the game felt very much like a strange new world to her.

I can understand that. She's never played any CCG's or anything like that, so it's not a surprise she felt that way. I'm not saying playing Blue Moon takes CCG experience, but it definitely helps to understand the concepts. I'm sure Johanna would figure out Blue Moon just fine if she wanted, but I'm not sure the motivation is there. Which is fine; we'll play other games.

Our game didn't quite tell me if Blue Moon is something I'll like or not. The world is fascinating - I like how they didn't go the stock fantasy route, but invented something completely new. I'm quite intrigued by the game and I've spent a lot of time reading about it at the Geek. That's always a good sign. Now I just wish the game can deliver, and preferably without too much effort and time. I'm sure it's a good game, if you play it a lot, but I know I probably won't, so I'm hoping it can be fun without that level of dedication.

I wanted to see how Johanna liked Phantom Rummy, so we played a game. It wasn't quite a success - we aborted after three rounds when Johanna was leading 8-4.

I wasn't quite sure she'd like the game to begin with... She likes Mhing, but is Phantom Rummy similar enough? Or too similar? As it turned out, Phantom Rummy wasn't interesting enough compared to Mhing.

There was an interesting psychological aspect, too. As anybody who has played Mhing or Mahjong knows, a large share of the game is about drawing and discarding useless stuff. That is the case with Phantom Rummy, as well.

Johanna felt annoyed when she had to draw and discard cards she knew were useless (as the cards are drafted from an open selection). It's no big deal when you get a mystery card and it's useless, but when you get to choose one from three useless cards, that's annoying to her. That was interesting.

Also, smaller hand means less room to manage cards, which Johanna didn't like. It's funny; I like Mhing and Phantom Rummy, Johanna likes Mhing but not Phantom Rummy - it's not automatic connection at all.

A review of Pünct in Finnish. After trying Pünct in Essen and knowing I probably won't play again, I thought I'd write a review since my opinion is already well-formed.

Pünct is a great addition to the Project GIPF line. It extends the set to connection games, a fairly important subgenre of abstract two-player games. Kris Burm's take on connection games is, once again, interesting and novel.

Unfortunately I have such a deep dislike towards connection games that even if Pünct is best in it's breed, I still can't find myself enjoying it a lot. Sure, I'll play if someone wants to, but I would definitely not buy a copy or suggest the game myself. However, I still think it's a pretty good game, just not for me.

So, what Pünct does? The board is a hexagon; the goal is to connect two opposing sides with a chain of pieces. Pieces are formed of three points and are either straight, v-shaped or triangular. One of the points is marked and called a Pünct - that's the centerpoint.

In addition to placing pieces on the board, they can be moved and rotated. They rotate around the Pünct and move in straight lines. Piece can land anywhere, where it's Pünct is on free space or on one's own piece. You can pile the pieces up and cut opponent's chains that way.

There's definitely a lot going on. Development of pieces on the board is a must, because running out of pieces to move can be fatal. I'm quite sure this is going to be another game with a good level of difficulty: easy to grasp, but hard to really figure out.

I applaud Kris Burm. Even if I don't find all of his games brilliant (Zèrtz, Dvonn and Yinsh are, Tamsk, Gipf and Pünct aren't), the series as a whole is a masterpiece of modern abstract game design. Well done, well done - and that's without his work outside Project Gipf!

Oh, by the way: check out online Yinsh and online Pünct at the Biskai site.

This blog has been categorized in a terrible way. The division between Less about games and More about games is idiotic. No librarian can be proud of a classification like that, no way. Thus, it's time to re-work the categories. Sorry for the trouble! I'm going through my archives, throwing stuff from one bin to another. As a result, the categories should make a lot more sense. When there are over 200 entries in a category, it's usually a good idea to see if it can be split into more manageable parts.

Grr. BoardGameGeek just won't answer. I don't have any particular need to use it, just some general checking, which I can't do because either the server is busy or the site doesn't answer at all, and I'm getting all aggravated about it. Talk about withdrawal symptoms... Please, please get back up, dear Geek!

As much as I wish to support the local game store, there are some offers you just can't afford to miss. Ta Yü is a really good game that's been either too expensive or hard to get. Now it's neither, as just about every German online store is unloading it at 19.90 euros. Go grab it, it's well worth the 20 euros! I've rated it as nine in Geek, and it might be worth a ten.

It's the mix of simple, intuitive mechanics (everybody can learn the game in 30 seconds) and relatively deep gameplay that makes me think Ta Yü is likely to be played for the next ten or twenty years - or even longer. It feels like a timeless classic already. That quality (both mechanics and pieces) at 20 euros? That's a steal.

Another pretty good deal: four copies of Lost Valley for 38.90 euros. I'm not sure why anybody would need four, but go on, buy them and create the mega game of Lost Valley you've always wanted to play! Or give the extra three copies as gifts, perhaps. The price is definitely well set.

We were visiting my parents in Jyväskylä this weekend (my grandfather's 85th birthday party was Saturday). We did play some games, as well.

Ismo and Raija joined me for a game of Dawn Under. I sold them my English copy, now I have the Finnish edition. I wanted to try my brand new Frische Luft für die Gruft expansion, so we added the bats and the Count Rucola.

Count Rucola is a very pretty wooden two-piece. There's a column and a black figure. First player to place three vampires on one round gets him. When you get Count Rucola, you get to place him in the end of your turn. He's placed on a grave, locking it - nobody can open it under any circumstances.

When the turn comes back to the player who controls Rucola, the grave is checked. If it's empty, a vampire is placed in (colour of the vampire doesn't matter) and Rucola is moved to another grave. If the grave was occupied, there's no penalty except the turn is over and Count Rucola moves to the next player.

He's a pretty good addition to the game, I think. He's especially great when you get him and can place him in the end of your round, when you bump into a wrong-coloured grave. Rucola is better than garlic.

The bats are another thing. Each player gets two bats, that can be used as guesses. You place a bat on grave, thus claiming the grave is empty. Everybody gets to doubt or not, then the grave is checked. If nobody doubts, the bat guy wins - if there's garlic or a vampire, it's even better. If someone doubts and the grave is occupied, the batman loses. Doubting at wrong time gets a stake.

I used my bats early in the game, in a situation where I had only white vampires available. As all the graves were empty, nobody doubted me so I was able to place my vampires in graves (like with Rucola, colour doesn't matter). Later in the game bats can be pretty good, too, if you get lucky and nobody doubts you when the grave is occupied.

Overall, I find Frische Luft a breath of fresh air. Rucola is good, bats are ok, and while the box is way too big for its contents, the pieces (particularly Rucola) are wooden and pretty.

We also played St. Petersburg. My game was tragic: in the last turn, I had something like 60 rubles, but nothing to do with them - I hadn't realised the blue buildings had run out. I lost, obviously. That was pretty weird, usually you can do something if you have lots of money.

I noticed there's an expansion coming up! It's just a small thing, 12 new cards, with the Spielbox-magazine. Read more at Spielbox-online. There's an order form, too, if you want it. The magazine costs 5.30 euros plus shipping.

Ismo and Raija had bought the pretty Heidelberger card games Korsar and Thor. I've played Korsar before, and didn't like it much. A new attempt had the same results, I even downgraded my rating from six to four. It just isn't fun, just very frustrating.

Thor, in the other hand, was much better. It's a good filler, short and to the point. It's very luck-dependent, though - scores swing wildly and there's often little one can do about it - at least with five players. Four player game had more control (as you get more god cards) and more enjoyment, three might be even better.

Pretty nice session, I'd say. New games (I've got 122 different games already this year!) and good experiences with old ones.

In a Geek thread called Italy is for AoS experts and France is for AoS beginners John Bohrer ranks the different Age of Steam expansion maps in this order by the level of their difficulty (from easy to difficult): France, US Rust Belt (basic map), England, Scandinavia, Germany, Western US, Ireland, Korea and Italy. The Italy map looks definitely nasty, with the income-reducing black cubes (I wonder what the thematical explanation for those cubes is?).

Saturday was games, games, games. About 50 people participated, playing lots of games. Few bigger ones were scheduled and the Memoir '44 tournament kept on going. Here's my games:

Indonesia. Splotter was the theme of the day, and I started with Indonesia. The game's about development of Indonesian economy. When the game begins, there are just five cities and the first rice and spice companies are started up. Companies merge, new cities appear, old ones grow, new companies start up, until all three eras have passed and one player emerges victorious.

Mergers are what makes the game interesting. Anybody (with enough R&D) can choose to merge any two companies, which are then auctioned off and sold to the highest bidder. Original owners split the money according to the sizes of their respective companies. There's a minimum prize (and it's pretty heavy in the early game), so you can't just completely rip someone off.

Even though I lost big time (final scores were 1274-1242-1120-1040-695), I had a blast. The game is deliciously complicated, and things like turn order and the order in which you operate your companies make a world of difference, as I noticed when my rice companies failed because Tommy would flood the cities with rice from his much bigger company...

There are very interesting decisions to make. Who owns the shipping? Do I want to make a city grow? Who benefits, if the city can take more resources (rule of thumb: shippers rarely do)? Where to start new companies? Should I sell my business now? Should I buy this business that's being sold? At what price?

It's not completely without problems, though. While the map is really pretty, it has some usability issues. The swirly writing isn't a problem, as I think you'll get familiar enough with it during the first game, but seeing the borders of some sea areas is tricky, particulary with the area around Western Java (Java Timur, to be exact), as the sea area surrounds the island, which can be hard to see. Or does it?

Biggest problem is still the shipping, which can get quite complicated. Companies must ship as much stuff as they can, and should do it as efficiently as possible. That'll take most of the time in the game, especially in the end when the map is full of stuff. It's not hard, but it takes a lot of work and concentration. Some people will be put off by that, and while I bear it, it's one of those things you'd prefer computer would do. But, I don't think that's news to anybody who's played the big Splotter games.

I guess the question is, is the game worth the 60 euros I paid for it, without thinking about it? Definitely. The game feels really good after this initial play. Of course, the three and half hours it took means that despite it's greatness, I won't be playing it a lot...

Fettnapf and Geschenkt. Just two quick rounds while waiting for the oven to heat and the pizza to warm up... Both are good fillers, Fettnapf has the novelty, while Geschenkt is a bit tighter and probably slightly better. Still, both are excellent games.

Antike was pretty high on my games to play -list. Now it was the time! We got four players and chose to play the Roman side, giving us Romans, Phoenicians, Greek and the Germans to fight for the glory. I got the Germans. It was a quick match, over in 70 minutes! Most of the time the turns moved really swiftly (slowing down a bit at Tommy), which was great.

Robert was playing very expansionist with his Phoenicians, scoring three kings from his 15 cities. Well, so did I - though I had to conquer one of the cities from Tommy. That was pretty much the only military action during the whole game, even though the threat was there and some temple-razing would've been seen had the game continued longer.

Robert ruled the game, he was in the lead all the time. I came right behind him, passing him maybe once, but most of the time I was one point behind or tied. Kim was third, despite her constant confusion with the phases of the game. Tommy had a might fine-looking empire with his Romans, but for some reason failed to score points.

Robert won - he snapped some scientists right before my eyes and got to expand on the Eastern Med without any trouble. I think the center powers should probably push towards the corners, otherwise the corner people will get to expand too freely. Now Kim moved towards Tommy's Rome, which left lots of room for Robert. That's definitely something I'll keep my eye on from now on.

Everybody enjoyed the game, even Tommy. And why not? The theme is intriguing, the mechanics are super-clean and the game moves on fast. I was so close to winning... Antike will keep on the top of my hot game list, that's for sure. Rematch at next Seurapelikerho, Robert?

Phantom Rummy. I thought I had figured out how to play the game, when I found out the English rules had some serious mistakes (in addition to being pretty badly written). Those corrections made it almost crystal-clear, so I was in good position to try the game at Helcon. I also corrected some guys, who I saw playing the game. It's a shame, when the rules are that faulty...

Anyway, the game was good. It's basically Mahjong: you try to form a hand of three three-card sets and a pair. However, in Phantom Rummy, you must meld one of the sets on table, and you can actually meld as many sets you want, as long as you have at least one melded set and two sets and a pair in your hand. Cards are not drawn from the deck, but from open cards on the table. You can take someone else's discards, but only to meld; if you've said ready (you're one card away from victory) you can take a discard to win the game.

Points are scored for melded sets and red-numbered cards (each card appears four times in deck, one has a red number), and only for the winner. There are advanced rules, which give more points if certain conditions are fulfilled, but we didn't use those. Reaping in the points was easy enough: Ali won three hands, with six, four and four points, winning the game. I got the biggest score, though, as I scored seven points on one hand.

Phantom Rummy is light, fun and looks great. It's a simplified take on Mahjong, and at least I found it fresh enough. Tommy commented that the game didn't quite inspire him, so maybe it's attraction isn't universal, but if you like Rummy or Mahjong, Phantom Rummy is a solid, little game.

Antiquity. Like I said, this was a Splotter day! We kicked off a four-player Antiquity and I realised, I'm not that good in explaining the rules to this game. I don't know, I should probably think about it a bit, how to do it, as there's a bunch of details and explaining them in proper order is tricky. In this case, it was also a question of time: we had very little time to get the game going, so we could finish it in time (we had four hours, which can get tight - we finished in three hours, to my surprise).

Once again, it was a blast, but a very anxious blast. For some reason (hint: famine and pollution) the game causes anxiety. It's fun to play, sure, but it's strange kind of fun. I was quite happy, as I was able to fight the famine for a long time, even though I wasn't playing San Christoforo. I chose San Giorgio from get-go, and was lucky to get Ali as my neighbour, as he didn't expand too much.

Tommy had spoken with Robert, who obviously passed on the information about San Christoforo's excellence... However, he was the only one to dedicate his cathedral to San C., and he didn't win either! Winner was Ansi, who played San Nicolo. He had problems with the famine, as graves filled his last spots for houses, but he managed to build a third city to get room for new houses. Well done. He also built a dump in the early game to control the pollution, but then left it unmanned for a long time after building stables and inns, so he could dump the pollution to someone else. I also had a good time dumping pollution around Ali's city.

In the end Tommy lost by one round only, and probably could've won the game had he not made some mistakes. Too bad. Ali hadn't chosen a saint yet, so I don't know about him. His game looked like a failure, but to my surprise, he built a second city, a hospital and the faculty of alchemy and got back to his feet! That was quite surprising!

What about me, then? I managed the famine and expanded my network of inns towards Ali. I was quite close from surrounding him, when the famine got out of control and I had to start building a new city to hold the graves. It was close, but not quite there... I'm still very satisfied, because I did so much better than the last time (I ended the game with, like, nine graves, not 69).

It was good fun, and the game reduced my fears of San Christoforo superiority. After all, San Nicolo won and my San Giorgio wasn't too far. Like Indonesia, Antiquity takes a lot of patience when it comes to moving tiny bits of cardboard (and is much worse in that respect, really), but if one can take that, few games can offer similar challenge.

Jungle Speed. This one was a good game to end the evening with, as it gave my poor brains a chance to wind down a bit. A gaming event with this intensity (and especially with games as intense as Indonesia or Antiquity) can create headache and stop one from sleeping...

In general Helcon was a great success, I enjoyed it a lot. The new location was excellent, and will probably be used again. The Memoir '44 campaign had some problems, but was still enjoyed a lot and I'm sure it'll see a lot of development and new attempts. Perhaps we'll see how the Germans attack Russia in KinkkuCon in January? Anyway, thanks to Tommy, Stefu and Ansi (and others, of course) for all the work they did for Helcon and to everybody I played games with, you were great!

(No need to wait for Sunday's entry; I skipped Sunday to be home with my wife. A wise choice, let me tell you!)