06.26.07
Week 25: Mid-summer fest, lots of gaming!
Last week was a great week for gaming for me. One reason was that the mid-summer fest here in Finland gave us a four day weekend and I spent it in Porvoo with family. There were so many good games that I will have to break this down to many blog posts, where I talk about specific games. Here is the rundown of what was being played:
- 4 x Ubongo
- 3 x Looping Louie
- 2 x Power Grid
- 2 x Jenseits Von Theben
- 2 x Backgammon
- 2 x For Sale
- 1 x Age of Empires III
- 1 x Relationship Tightrope
- 1 x Zooloretto
A tip for those that try to game with their non-gamer family members: Have games available of different length and that play with different number of players. This was my secret of being able to play a lot during the weekend. I always had something to offer, from Looping Louie to Power Grid. Nice thing to notice was that everything got played quite equally. I have been training my family well ;)
What has been the game you have played the most lately?
06.25.07
Zooloretto wins SdJ!
You might have already spotted the news that Zooloretto wins the grand prize. Spiel des Jahres is easily the most coveted boardgame title.
I’ve had a chance to play Zooloretto for two times now. They both have been okay experiences, but I found myself wanting something more. It just wasn’t that exciting gameplay for me. One thing that particularly bugged me is the fact that you are trying to hoard a lot of similar animals to your zoo, instead of trying to have a lot of different kind of animals there. At least that’s what I like better when I went to Zoo’s as a child.
But I can understand why it won. The theme is very cute, it will certainly be appealing to families, game time is not too long and so on. This just shows me that I am not the target group for SdJ – I care more about IGA (International Gaming Award).
Congrats to Michael Schacht for designing the game and for the rest of the crew as well. Congrats to Lautapelit.fi for publishing the game in Scandinavia way before it was even nominated. They sure have
06.20.07
Age of Empires III – My early thoughts
The boardgame version has been getting very good reviews and ratings and it’s theme is close to our game in design, Cuzco, so I have been wanting to play this for a while now. Yesterday I finally got the chance to do so. Thank you Nokia guys! I won’t go over the details of the rules, because there are plenty of other reviews that do that already. I will try to concentrate on how I felt playing the game, what I liked and disliked.
Our gameplay
06.18.07
Week 24: Wallenstein returns
After a long sleep, Wallenstein sees a return to our gaming table. When I first got it I was afraid my family would not be willing to play it due to it’s long length. How wrong I was! It was a smash hit, even my older brother’s wife loved it so much that they bought it as well. We played it almost every Sunday. This year we haven’t been gathering together for so long and thus not being able to play Wallenstein. Yesterday was an exception and I took my copy of Wallenstein with me just in case.. and it worked! We had a very nice and tight game.
06.11.07
Weekly stats (week 23)
I thought it would be nice to keep a gaming calendar and reflect back on what I played last week. So this is an attempt to do this. Maybe these are mostly for myself, but maybe someone will be interested to see them as well. The Internet is full of people that like even weirder things :) Read the rest of this entry »
Playtest report
Friday we had a great playtest of Cuzco. One new player (a woman) and two professional players for their second time. They had played Cuzco almost a year ago and it had changed remarkably from that. Some of the biggest changes were results from their last playtest, so we had high hopes for this time as well.
06.08.07
We need some images!
Okay, we were thinking this blog would still be under the radar, but it seems that people (you!) are already finding out about it, so we need to get things going. First, we need some images! We have some, but they are pretty outdated. We will have a playtest (with potential publishers) tonight, so that will offer us a chance to take some photos as well. Images really tell more than (at least mine) thousand words.
Please do write a comment if there are obvious (or even not so obvious) things that we should add.
06.07.07
Boardgamer types
I recently rated all the games I can remember playing in Boardgamegeek. It brought a couple of thoughts to my mind:
- There are a lot of games that I see as “ok” -games, which got ratings 6-7, some even 8. But there seems to be very narrow group of games that I have truly enjoyed and still keep enjoying. I want to find out what do they have in common – what makes a great game for me. Do you know what are the ingredients that make a great game for you?
- The main idea was, that there really are different kind of gamers:
- Those that are always wanting to try something new (this is probably me)
- Those that have only a few games, that they play over and over again
- Those that love to own as many games as they possibly can, but won’t necessary have time to play them many times (if at all!)
Can you find more stereotypes of gamers? Can you categorize yourself into one of these?
History, part 1
Since most of you will be new to Cuzco, I will go over the history of designing the game. I will divide it in different parts to make it easier to read. Most of the things are from the memory, so I hope they are at least somewhat accurate.
The beginning
The whole idea of designing a boardgame began in first quarter of 2004. I had loved games all my life, but started playing more in 1996-97 when I first was introduced to the Settlers of Catan. I played it a lot with my family and friends, including Antti. But it wasn’t until Puerto Rico in late 2003 that I started buying more boardgames and not just games related to the Catan. It was the same Puerto Rico that got Antti excited over the boardgames and he started to build his own game collection.
The idea
So in 2004 we had had a relatively nice taste of different games out there. One day while talking, Antti mentioned the possibility to make our own game. Read the rest of this entry »
06.05.07
Playtest with Otaniemi guys
Yesterday we had a playtest with Petri and AnttiT, who both study in TKK, which is located in Otaniemi. They are both very good at boardgames so it gave as a chance to see how well Cuzco lives up to the test. Well, they both had played the game earlier and AnttiT was already ready to purchase the game two years ago! But still, we had some recent modifications (how the royal orders are played, secret maps) that we wanted to test some more.
The game play
The game played out well. One strange thing happened: I and Petri had too much money throughout the game (later we discovered that one reason for that was that there were way too many gems in the exploring deck!). No one was willing to fight for provinces and everyone was peacefully boosting their productivity.. Read the rest of this entry »
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