June 2006 Archives

Here's a list of hottest games for the second quarter of 2006 for me. This is based on number of plays, my enjoyment of the game and the novelty value, so new games tend to show up higher on the list.

You can also check the previous quarter, with completely different games.

Thurn und Taxis - Winner by far. Then again, it did get ten plays during the period. I like the game, but that's as far as it goes, really. It's definitely a game I enjoy playing (in BSW, for example), but it isn't special enough to buy or probably even suggest outside BSW.

Puerto Rico - Old warhorse took the second place after seven games during the quarter. It was fun, getting back to PR in BSW. I did well, too, though I don't think I won many. Several

Halli Galli - An unplanned purchase that went down really well. I like it a lot. Short game, thus not worth much happiness, but lots of plays and great novelty value this quarter. Should come up fairly often in future, as well.

San Juan - Quite a few BSW games of this old favourite. San Juan should do well in most of these lists, I expect, as it is my number one choice in BSW most of the time.

Verflixxt! - On the list for the novelty effect this quarter, but may become a standard entry. Johanna likes this one a lot, and all but two of my playings have been two-player. I could see myself playing this in BSW with more players, but the two-player game is great mostly because of the company.

Blue Moon - One intensive session this quarter. That seems to be the way I play this game: longer sessions every now and then. Then again, two-player game time with someone else than Johanna is fairly rare.

Indonesia - Just a single game, but it's a long game and I like it a lot, so it made the list. This is definitely high on my list of games I really, really want to play more.

Age of Steam Expansion #3: Scandinavia & Korea - The same thing here: just one play, but it's a good, longer game. I like this less than Indonesia, but the novelty effect is higher, since it was the first time I tried the map. We played Scandinavia, which was nice.

For Sale - I finally got myself the new Überplay For Sale. It was about time! This should see fairly regular action.

My son was born today, just seven minutes past midnight. He's small, cute and seems to enjoy sleeping quite a lot. I don't know what to say, it was simply an amazing experience seeing the birth and the first few moments, my son and his mother together. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Olli M. was interested in playing two-player games during the summer. Since our baby likes to keep us waiting, I had plenty of time to meet Olli for games. We played a hefty session of Blue Moon. In two and half hours we managed to play eight matches, so both of us could play through all the peoples. That's a pretty good Blue Moon session to me.

It's still quite an excellent game. Most of the matches were really close, up to final battles. I think two of the eight matches went to tie-breaker, they were that close. Only one 4-0 victory was seen, which is rare. We did have few rather delicious long fights, with surprising twists and turns. Those are usually fatal for the loser, but to me that's what really makes the Blue Moon experience shine.

It's a really good game, after about 30 matches. It's quite expensive to get, I admit that, but I'd say it's worth it. The Buka Invasion expansion is one of the few games I really anticipate.

On the Finnish site, a review of Indonesia just came up.

Indonesia is a serious business game from Splotter, the guys behind Antiquity and Roads and Boats, two highly esteemed heavy games. Indonesia is a worthy addition to that line.

Players work behind the scenes of the Indonesian industry. The beginnings are humble: few rice fields there, few spice plantations there and a couple of boats to connect the fields to the cities that yearn for the products.

However, new companies start every turn. Every now and then, new business opportunities rise: rubber plantations, siap faji microwave meals, oil fields, new shipping lines. Players grab these to produce more. The products are shipped to the ever-hungry cities, which grow as they are fed, needing even more products. Players try to make as much money as possible from this system.

Mergers & Acquisitions

The key element in the game are mergers. Players can join two companies together; an auction decides, who gets to own the new company. Original owners get to share the money. The new company can later be merged to something else. This means you shouldn't get too attached to your companies, as they can be stolen from you by a hostile takeover.

The shipping companies are an interesting twist in the game. Producers need ships to deliver the goods (remember, Indonesia is an archipelago). Shipping costs; in worst case scenarios you'll have to ship so far you'll end up paying more than you get for selling your products. Since you have to sell everything you can, that can be a pain. Owning the shipping lines makes it so much easier.

Flaws

While the challenges are interesting, the game has some flaws. It looks pretty, but the map has few difficult spots where good looks win usability. The game also seems unnecessarily complicated at points. The operations phase is particularly something you'd wish a computer would handle. It's complicated and takes more time than anything else in the game.

Another problem are the merger auctions, where you must bid in odd increments (the total value of the merged companies). Better start memorizing the multiplication tables for numbers like 7, 9, or 13 - up to 600-700 or so - because you'll need them. Keep a calculator handy.

Good economics

Despite these flaws, Indonesia is a sweet game. I think it's a superb way to spend the three or four hours it takes (prepare for four or five hours the first time you play, and keep the Geek handy, you'll run into questions). The game definitely works with four or five players; of those, I'd prefer four (the game will be turn or two longer, which makes it better) and I'm really curious on how the three-player game will turn out. Might be even better, really.

If you're into economical games and don't mind some complicated rules (most of Indonesia is pretty simple, but there are few trickier parts) or long play time, you can't go wrong with Indonesia.

This Finnish review of Touché has been up for a while. Well, better later than never...

Touché is a simple game, where players are trying to form patterns on the board. Each round is play a card, draw a card, until someone forms a pattern. All pieces except those on the pattern are removed and a new round begins. This continues until someone makes three patterns.

The game uses a double deck of standard playing card, with each card symbol appearing twice on the board. I find that solution fairly boring; it certainly brings the game closer to average consumers, but still, it's quite uninspired.

Of course, that fits well with the rest of the game. There are some decisions in the game, after all players have five cards in their hands, but they are of the simplest kind. See if you can form a pattern. See if you can advance a pattern. See if you can block someone else's pattern. Play a random card if nothing else works.

If you're looking for a way to spend time without exercising your brains, Touché is as good as anything else. If you want a challenge, there's none included.

TradeResolver has evolved to release 4, which is probably the last release for a while now. The program works and has plenty of interesting features. In the speed of the brute force mode it loses to TradeGenie, but then again, even TradeGenie is too slow to completely run through bigger lists in reasonable amount of time. TradeResolver has a guessing mode, which might find a good solution faster.

You can download TradeResolver from my TradeResolver home page. The package includes a JAR version for easy use (the program is written in Java and will run on any platform with a Java interpreter) and source codes. It's basically public domain, do whatever you want with it, I don't mind. I just hope it will provide happy trading for people who use it.

I got a copy of Margin for Error to try. It's a partnership trick-taking game, so it'll have to wait until the next time I have four players together. It looks simple enough: there's a captain who decides, whether their team will go for lots of points or no points. Other team tries to mess up their plans. Little unoriginal perhaps, but it should work pretty well, I suppose.

Yesterday's game session was motivated by cider. Some local pubs have cider weeks right now and being such a cider fan as I am, I wanted to check out their real cider - it was called Broadside or Broadwinds, don't know for sure. It was good (though not superior to Weston's Old Rosie), as were Stowford Press Supreme (very smooth cider made from organically grown apples) and Hard Core (pretty standard British cider, except it's from the USA).

As for games, we played Cosmic Eidex and Mhing. Cosmic was good, it was an excellent match. Very close: we were first tied at 2 points, then at 4. When the time was to tie the game at 6 (Olli was leading 5-5-6), I tried to score all tricks to win the game right away, but the distribution of trumps foiled my plan and Olli got the game 7-6-5. It was all very close and exciting.

Next time I think I'll try playing with a regular deck of cards, because while the Cosmic Eidex deck is pretty, it's also distracting. The sixes and nines are particularly bad, as are some aces.

Mhing was fun, it was completely new experience to Olli and Robert had only played Mahjong. Both caught up with the game soon, and we had a nice, close match. I think we played something like eleven rounds and the wins went 4-4-3, with Robert left behind. The rounds were mostly low scores, just a few 64-point hands. In the end, I won the game by two points.

I still think Mhing is the best form of Mahjong. It could probably use few more special scoring hands to make the winds and the dragons a bit more attractive. Right now they're quite useless. Of course, they tend to be the first things to discard in regular Mahjong as well, but there you have more special hands and the winds are more valuable with the whole concept of personal wind and of course as they tend to give you multipliers (well, Mhing credit is kind of multiplier, actually, but it doesn't feel the same).

Maybe even something as simple as giving two credits for a honor triplet? That should make them more attractive. I'll have to think about that, I expect Johanna would like to try that because she has complained about the weakness of the winds and the dragons as well.

Remember when I wrote about my Ricochet Robot solver back in 2002? Maybe not, but today I did get a message from Matthias Krings, telling me he has a working Ricochet Robot that's fast.

He doesn't have Windows binaries, so I can't check right now, but if you're running Linux, go check Yet Another Ricochet Robot solver. Source code is included, as far as I can tell.

Yesterday was board game club day, despite nice weather, sunshine and all. We won't let that stop us! The turnout was good, three tables going on all the time. I got a nice bunch of people playing with me the whole afternoon with few changes. I suppose I can trust the club goes well without me. With the baby coming and all, I've stepped down from organizing the club, but the Kajaste brothers seem to do a good job at that, so no need to worry about that.

Edel, Stein & Reich - Now here's something I don't have to play again! Double-guessing what your opponents are doing is probably one of my least favourite mechanics, particularly when it's combined with a punishment mechanism like in this one. When three players choose the same option (with five players and four options, it certainly is possible), nobody gets nothing. That's how I lost six of eighteen turns in the game.

The game itself is quite clever and I can see how someone else can like this one. Go ahead, enjoy the game, but there's no way I'm going to play it again, even with less than five players. This just isn't my cup of tea.

Bunte Runde - This time I played with the Veleno variant, where you add your score and the score of your left-hand neighbour. It was good, the game is slightly better with the variant. I'm not sure how necessary the variant is, but it does improve the game and I expect I'll be using that variant from now on. The game also works well with five players.

Frank's Zoo - My favourite relaxed climbing game. A quick three rounds did the job, when Robert and Tero both scored nine points on the last round and reached 19 points. My brave eight-point last round wasn't enough to compete, after getting a whopping zero points on the first round.

Modern Art - Here's a strategy clue for you: everybody gets money from the cards they sell (unless they buy them themselves and pay too much). If you buy art from others, you'll get money from their cards as well. You're trying to maximise the profit, and there it helps, if you can profit from everybody's cards, not just your own.

Remembering that might've rescued me from the last place.

For Sale, Halli Galli - Nothing new here. Both are excellent short games. I continued my domination of the Halli Galli scene, winning all three games we played. For once, I also won For Sale once (but failed miserably in the second game).

I met the guys at the University cafe for a small session yesterday. Interesting enough, the entry exams for information studies were at the same time as our games! I was there too, six years ago, and now I'm just about graduated. I'm glad I'm done with that, really.

We started with For Sale, which really one darn good filler. Brilliant game, even though I didn't win.

Next up was Industrial Waste as requested by Olli H. It was a rare thing, a four-player game. I've played mostly three-player games... With four players you'll see more accidents, and in our game everybody but me got hit few times. Guess who won? I'd like to think I did well otherwise, too. Olli M. had his factory rationalised early on, but got just about one card to actually remove the workers. That's bad luck - considering he had some money problems that kept him from winning (debt and all), that might've been crucial.

Mexica was one of my wishes. It's one of those games I feel I don't play enough. Mario Lanza writes about Mexica (and other games) in his blog, and hadn't I just played the game, I'd be annoyed. Now I'm happy, but I want to play again!

I didn't do well, that's one reason... I was the starting player, a position which I don't like. As Mario's entry tells you, Mexica is a game of efficiency and of course it's very important that everybody gets as many turns. Still, I hate it when people surprise me and end the game sooner than I expected. I know the deal: pay more attention! Also, as a first player being the player to end the game might be a good idea. I was kind of aiming for that this time, but it didn't work out, as Olli M. traveled little but built a lot.

Anyway, it's a clever game and I'm pondering if I should actually play it again in Seurapelikerho this Sunday...

For the last game we took a round of Bunte Runde. It's a small game from Knizia and Winning Moves. Olli M. had bought it, for some reason, and it's not a bad deal at all. It's a small filler, but the mechanics are interesting and the wooden components are very pleasing.

Bunte Runde looks like a children's game and, well, that's correct: there's a children's game in the box. But it's not bad with adults, either. The simple mechanic of collecting pieces from the board to score points seems shallow, but is deeper than you'd think. Bruno Faidutti's thoughts on the game are interesting, he has an interesting variant for the game.

It was a good small session and as I said, next up is the board game club on Sunday.