Yesterday was double tournament session: Manuela, Ester and Keith played Caylus (in the absence of Paul B.), while Nick Baldyworthy, Dan and I played Stone Age. Interestingly, it was Dan’s first face-to-face game: so far, he only played on BrettSpielWelt. With Nick and Dan having each several games under their belt, and I having only played once before, it was no surprise I lost. Badly. The final score says it all: Read more… »
If video games existed at the time historical figures lived, who would you like to have designed one? And which kind of game would they design? Some curious suggestions at the Guardian’s game blog. I especially like the proposal for a one-level platform game by Escher. Something along the picture on the left, I imagine. A single level would be mind-boggling enough, let alone having to face further levels if you manage to escape this building!
Last night five of us were due to play Princes of Florence for our Eurogames tournament. Before the holidays, Richard couldn’t come in the last minute; this time it was Paul B. So we decided it was only fair to postpone again. Will we be third time lucky?
Fortunately, many other people had no pre-arranged game and hence there was no lack of choice of which games to play and with whom. In the end, I decided to join Ester, Julian and Pete for a game of Bison, which I had never heard of before. It turned out to be another K&K (Kramer & Kiesling) area control game, with a dash of Knizia and Carcassonne. It was Pete’s game but he couldn’t remember the rules, so we had to endure a painfully slow and confusing rule explanation process, in which Pete half read the rules aloud and half re-explained them. After half an hour we got it (except Julian, who got the basic cost mechanism only half-way through the game). The rules are actually quite clever and put together familiar mechanisms.
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… »
spielbox issue 1/2008 comes with a new building for Cuba. The contents is as follows, with games in italics receiving the best reviews: Read more… »
I simply had to buy issue 5/2006 of spielbox: it comes with an expansion for one of my favourite networking games, Thurn and Taxis. The contents is as follows, with games in italics receiving the best reviews: Read more… »
The Hans im Glück Almanac is one of the occasional special issues of the spielbox magazine. After two issues about games (Settlers of Catan in 2000 and Carcassonne in 2005), and one about an author (Reiner Knizia in 2006), this one appeared in 2008 for the 25th anniversary of this German publisher of well-known and award-winning games, some of them shown on the cover. (Can you tell the games?)
The Knizia Almanac is one of the occasional special issues of the spielbox magazine. After two issues about games (Settlers of Catan in 2000 and Carcassonne in 2005), this one appeared in 2006 as a tribute to one of the greatest and most prolific game authors of all time: Reiner Knizia.