Thursday session: Eketorp

Another Thursday session, this time on Tuesday because the Vappu festivities on Thursday mean the university is closed.

After a quick round of Coloretto we bit into Eketorp. Whether to play this or not was a bit of a question, since from reading the rules I knew I would not enjoy the game. However, I decided there is some value having played the game - at least I can now write a review of it, since it's coming out in Finnish.

The reason why I don't like the game lies in the main mechanics: double-guessing and blind bidding. That's it. First players allocate their viking warriors on different fields. If you're lucky and choose fields nobody else is taking, you get good rewards. If you fail to do that, you'll have to fight and win to get anything. Fighting is done by playing battle cards with values from 1 to 6: bigger card wins, then players exchange cards.

This is repeated for ten rounds. It's a long session of rather tedious repetition. The box says 45-60 minutes, our game took 90 minutes. I could tolerate a game like this for 30 minutes. It'll take some convincing to get me play this one again. It's not a bad game if you like this sort of thing: one person in our game enjoyed it a lot.

After Eketorp we played one quick round of Die Dolmengötter, this time with all newbies except me. The Ollis offered tough opposition: the top three had scores of 73, 72 and 70. Tapani took the fourth place 20 points behind... Dolmengötter gets better every time. This time I made some blunders, didn't play my druids well, but managed to survive anyhow. I did one teleport jump without leaving a stone, that was a critical move which ensured my win even though I had to pay a point there. Interesting, interesting...