Math trades and Spiel des Jahres

I've been rather excited with the concept of math trades. There's loads of math trade activity in the Geek, just check the trade forum (the math trade guide is good if you don't know what this is all about). I haven't been involved in those, as it doesn't make sense from Finland and I've yet to organise a Finnish math trade for games.

However, I've alredy organised two math trades for metal music cds, on the second time we had a list of 369 cds to choose from. That's a nice selection. I've also ran one math trade for console games, which was also a great success. If I was more into collecting dvds, I'd be running one for those as well.

To make things more interesting, I've created a tool for resolving math trades. TradeGenie is good, but I'm such a geek that I just had to make my own. It works on OS X, which is nice. Anybody interested to give it a go can e-mail me, you can also check my geek post for more info. My resolver isn't quite as robust as TradeGenie, but can provide better results in shorter time on some cases.

Spiel des Jahres nominees are up. It's no big surprise my candidate for winner is Thurn und Taxis - it's clearly SdJ material and a good game. Blue Moon City is Knizia's 13th attempt (according to Rick Thornquist) to win SdJ, and my second guess. Haven't played the game, but it seems a possible winner. Still, Thurn und Taxis is my bet.

It was nice they gave Caylus a special award for being a good, complex game. Obviously it would have nothing to do on the nominee list, but this was a good way to show some respect for heavier games. On the Kinderspiel des Jahres side, Nacht der Magier is a very good game, don't know about the rest.