October 2008 Archives

Last Sunday I visited the board game club and instead of the quick visit last time, I was able to play games for few hours. We started with a quick round of Halli Galli Extreme for warm-up. It's a nice little game, quick and entertaining. Some won't like the extra difficulty from the animals, but I find it attractive.

Dominion was the next game in line. We ended up playing two games in a row, using two setups from the rulebook. The first one was the recommended beginner setup - fairly simple, basic cards with little interactivity or difficult stuff - and the second was the money setup (I don't know what it's called in English, because I have a Finnish copy).

The two games were completely different. The first one took almost an hour and had lots of actions played every turn, while the second one only took about 30 minutes and saw plenty of money flowing around and many more scoring cards bought.

So, is it any good? Yeah! Brian Bankler thinks it's slightly dull (read his review of Dominion), but I found it charming. There's some luck of the draw, little long-term planning and no direct interaction between players - but it's fun to see your deck evolve, you can plan your next turn while the other players play and the game usually moves quickly.

It's fun, that is. Looks like I'll be trying to find some time to hit BSW - I've been away for a long time, but Dominion might be the game that brings me back. I want to play this game, now!

After that we continued with Container. I got this from a friend who totally hates the game. I suppose I can see why - it's not for everybody. I'm not sure if I like it!

It's a business game, with lots of buying and selling. Players have factories that produce goods, which the other players buy to their warehouses, where someone else can buy them to their ship. Ships take the goods to the island, where an auction is held for the goods. Complicated!

There's quite a few details in it. In the scoring what counts is the containers on your part of the island. The five different colours of containers have different values to different players, everybody loses their most common colour of containers and getting one of each colour doubles the value of one colour. Even more complicated!

In our game the economy was very tight, selling stuff was hard. Only the cheapest possible prices were accepted. So, the only way to make any money was to ship stuff. That paid well, especially as a government subsidy means that whatever the highest bidder pays, bank pays as well.

I made a huge mistake and ran out of money when I had maxed out on loans. The guys didn't buy anything from me for few turns, which meant the bank confiscated my containers to cover the loan interest. I recovered, eventually, but was completely out of competition for the rest of the game. The final scores were 130-118-52-29.

It's a tricky game and as I said, I'm not sure if I like it. I get the complaints about boring repetition and dryness. The economy is brutal and in our game probably a bit too tight to be interesting. We're probably playing the game next Thursday, as there's some interest for modern-day business games in our group and there aren't too many of those around.

After that game I'll be able to say something more definite about the long-term staying power of the game.

I went to the Helsinki Book Fair yesterday. I was interviewed about my card game book, we did a quick 20-30 minute session, which went really well. I'm becoming a professional author, obviously, I can actually do public performances.

I knew that Lautapelit.fi had a booth at the fair, so I arranged to pick up a copy of Race for the Galaxy: Gathering Storm. As it happened, they got the Finnish edition of Dominion out sooner than announced, so I was able to get that one too. Cool.

Gathering Storm is nice. There's not much stuff in the box, but it seems good. The cards are interesting. I don't care much about the solitaire version - I'll try it, sure - and the goal tiles may be good and then again maybe not. We'll see. Still, the new stuff seems like it's worth the price.

Dominion seems pretty cool. I wasn't able to figure out the game from the descriptions I've read so far, but now I've read the rules it all clicks and sounds seriously interesting. Fortunately I'll get to try it tomorrow, I believe. Based on rules, it sounds good, but I'll have to see how it works out in practise.

Oops, looks like I forgot to publish the Finnish Players' Picks results for 2008. Well, better late than never! To see the top 28, see Finnish Players' Picks 2008 GeekList. For complete list (in Finnish, but the data speaks math), see the official results page. You might also be interested in the collected results for 2003-2008 (yes, I've been doing this voting that long!).

Few helpful tips: "Sija" is "rank", "Äänet" means "votes" and "Peli" is "game".

The winner? Do you need to ask? Finland is no island in the board game world. We, too, love Agricola a lot, and are not afraid of the German language. Race for the Galaxy ended up two votes behind and could've been a winner, but after that, there was a gap of 13 votes before the next game.

Boardgaming Finland has done their first podcast in English. It's an interview of Jussi Autio from Tuonela Productions, the creators of The Club.

I'm using Twitter these days, I'm msaari there. Actually, my priority feed is in Identi.ca (msaari there as well), I just automatically copy everything to Twitter as it's the more popular service. If you're new to this micro-blogging stuff, I recommend checking Identi.ca out, it's a cool concept.

I think I'll skip a larger session report for yesterday's game session. Suffice to say we played half a game of mahjong with the World Series rules and it was very nice. I won, too, thanks to winning the first four out of eight hands and scoring one major hand.

After mahjong we played a game of Verflixxt! with the standard mix of stuff from both expansions (Flixxy, risk tiles, Verflixxt tiles, exact finish bonus points and hats). It was fun, even though we used one pawn too many for each player. Quite a crowded race!

The Christmas is coming, by which I mean Essen. There's a pile of new games getting published, but I'm really not very interested in most of them. I mean, there's plenty of nice stuff coming, but in the end, I don't really care.

I must say we've had excellent service on the Board Game Society forums, where Oskari has been reading the rules to just about every Essen release and has already posted 15 reports. Great stuff.

However, there are few titles I'm definitely interested in:

• The Winsome Essen set (Gulf, Mobile & Ohio, Preußische Ostbahn, Wabash Cannonball Erie Expansion and AoS: Texas, Oklahoma & New Mexico). I'm on the list, so I will buy this. For the record, I don't care whether John Bohrer or Martin Wallace is right. Whatever's going on between those two guys, I don't let it come between myself and some good games.
• The Queen Games version of Wabash Cannonball aka Chicago Express. I'm interested, but I think I'll wait and see if they're doing a Finnish translation of it.
• Duck Dealer, which is the odd new Splotter game. Buying and selling cheap crap in the world of intergalactic trade? Complex planning, infrastructure development, route-building... From Splotter. 100% non-avoidable. Must-buy. Won't think twice. Something that needs to be bought pretty soon, though the 1500 copy print run will last for a while. Only 200 copies available in Essen, so having some patience helps.
• Le Havre from Uwe Rosenberg - Agricola 2? I actually don't know much about this, haven't bothered to read all the reports, but yes, definitely interesting.
• Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm is mostly a question of when. Great game, interesting expansion, a must-buy.
• Dominion is interesting, particularly since there's a Finnish edition available. I'm not rushing to buy it, but wouldn't mind a review copy... (hint, hint).
• Steel Driver is Martin Wallace's idea of developing Prairie Railroads further. Since Wabash Cannonball shares the same roots, this'll be an interesting comparison.

And that's pretty much it. I'm pretty sure there are copies of both Duck Dealer and Le Havre available in Helcon, so hopefully I'll get to try them there. There will be an obscene amount of new games to try, actually, since Markku from Board Game Society has begged dozens of demo copies of games from publishers. That's easy, since the games can be picked from Essen and sent to Finland by the Society work mules visiting the fair. So, any Finnish gamers interested in the new stuff should simply head to Helcon in late November.

Edit: Added Steel Driver.

I went to Jyväskylä with Nooa for the weekend and as usual, it means some games too. Their collection has grown enough that I don't really have to bring any games with anymore, so this time I just brought a pack of mahjong cards with me.

So that's what we started with, six hands of mahjong with the World Series of Mahjong rules. Despite being a rule set used in World Championships (the one with huge money prizes), it's remarkably simple and elegant set. I like it.

I won, thanks to a pretty nice one suit and honours hand I made in the final hand. Previously we saw some chicken hands and some pung hands. The cards were nice to use, but not quite the quality I'd really like to have. The cards are made in China and cheap, and it shows. The worst problem with the cards is a small detail, actually: the corner indices (in Arabic numerals, so these are really easy to use) for both bamboos and characters are green. Dots are blue, so why on earth aren't characters red? That would make a huge difference in usability.

In any case playing with cards was nice. I would've brought my new, fancy tiles with me, but since we were playing while Nooa slept, the cards were a better option. Of course, Nooa didn't sleep a bit, but instead kept singing and shouting in his bed, but I suppose that counts as rest... But just six hands, because eventually we had to release him...

During the afternoon we played two games of Villa Paletti (still great fun) and two games of Scrabble: I first challenged Severi and then Oskari wanted to play against me, too. I won both... I did better against Oskari, but he was also better than his brother. In any case I can say that Scrabble and Finnish doesn't quite click together as well as I'd like, the lack of usable two-letter words makes the game boring. I'd much rather play Qwirkle than Finnish Scrabble.

After Nooa went to bed in the evening, we played Agricola. My mother really likes the game, so when I got the English edition, I sold it to my mother immediately. Now I don't have to bring it with me. We played a nice five-player family game, where Ismo grew tons of grain, I've never seen such abundance before. He won, too, with a nice score of 32.

I was second with 27 or so... Nothing fancy in my farm, but a fairly solid game and I was the only player with five family members (Ismo got the fourth with his last move, others stuck with three). It's been a while since I last played Agricola, and it certainly was great fun. The Z-Man edition has some small, but nice usability improvements over the original Lookout edition. Not enough to get me to upgrade, but nice.

My final game of the evening was a round of riichi mahjong at MahjongTime. The site doesn't have enough European players, since the most action seems to happen when I'm asleep. Fortunately I only have a temporary membership pass there and not the full membership, as it would be useless. Now I was able to get into a game quickly and played a nice round of riichi. I lost (ended up third, actually), though, even though I won two hands. I would've won third, too, but fumbled with the controls and discarded the wrong tile. Well, I wouldn't have won even with that hand, since I paid two expensive hands in the very beginning.

I've had a bit of a dry spell with games recently, as I've missed two sessions of Thursday games, so it was extra nice to get some board game action.

Dutch professor Ben van der Genugten has created a formula for calculating the skill level of a game. He has used it in Dutch courts to help determine that fantasy sports games are games of skill and now he's using it to argue that poker is a game of skill, too. (See Leading Professor Rekindles Dutch Debate on Poker as a Game of Skill by Gaming Intelligence Group, free registration required - bugmenot helps).

His formula is simple. Skill level is Learning effect / (Learning effect + Chance effect). Result is a score between 0 and 1.

Learning effect is the difference between the optimum player and a beginner. In games of pure chance like roulette this is of course 0, in a more skilled game this approaches 1. For example in go, a skilled player will beat a newbie for certain, so the value is 1.

Chance effect is the difference between the optimum player and a player who knows the result of the game before the game. Say, in roulette, a player who knows where the ball will land. Of course, in roulette the difference would be huge. In poker the difference is significant too, if you consider a pro player and even a beginner who can see the everybody's cards. In go and chess this would be zero, as there's really no information to be known in advance.

Professor van der Genugten gets a value of 0.4 for poker and 0.049 for blackjack. Fantasy sports leagues get 0.3 from him. I think this is a pretty neat idea, but coming up with the exact values can be a bit tricky.