ludossier

For over 2 years I have been wishing to play Goa, an award-winning and highly rated economic development game, in which players take the role of 16th century Portuguese spice merchants trading from Goa, a colony of Portugal from 1510 to 1961. I admit I wasn’t pro-active and just waited for the co-occurrence of three conditions: Steve coming to the club and bringing his copy, and me having no pre-arranged game. The wait for a particular alignment of planets would have been shorter… Well, last week the horoscope must have been favourable to Scorpios because I finally got my chance.

Adding to this the pleasure of seeing Michael join us again after many months of absence (because his live Internet radio show about videogames clashed with our games night) made for a really nice start of the evening.

Steve explained the rules to Paul B., Paul H. and me. Paul H. had a vague recollection he had played the game before (I now checked it was on March 19th). The gist of the game is rather familiar: Read more… »

Returning from holidays last week, the usual pile of mail awaited behind the door. It’s mostly junk mail, of course, but there are two nuggets among the pizza ads, credit card offers, and local newspapers: Developing Games 2008, the proceedings of the 3rd German Game Designers’ Days, and spielbox issue 4/2009, which comes with two extensions.

Interestingly, almost all games reviewed in this issue, even those by experienced designers, have rather average scores. I guess it’s just a sign that far too many games are published, which decreases the quality: there is a limit on truly good games that designers can come up with. Sadly, there is a lack of reports and interviews in this issue, two of my favourite rubrics. So, the contents is as follows, with games in italics receiving great reviews: Read more… »

On March 19th, I played Caylus for the second time. I wasn’t very thrilled about the game after the first play, in October 2007: my memory is of a never-ending and brain-busting game. Maybe I played it too soon, before  I had done my proper ‘apprenticeship’ of other, less heavy games. I therefore took the opportunity to give it a second go, hoping I would appreciate it better this time. Indeed, having meanwhile played other action-selection games, like Pillars of the Earth, the game mechanics made much more sense this time, and the game proceeded smoothly and quicker than 2 years before, but Read more… »