Recently in Less about games Category

As a new feature I'm going to review playing-cards. There are quite a few different packs available and finding information about them is hard. So, here's something and more to come, especially if I get any encouragement.

Piatnik Tarock 54 Blatt Nr. 1935. This is an Austrian-style 54-card Tarock pack. That is, 22 trumps and 32 other cards. As usual, there are king, queen, knight and jack in each suit and 7-10 in black suits and 1-4 in red suits. Cards have no indices, but the court cards are easy to tell from each other and with pip cards, the lack of indices is only problem for the black cards. In most games the pip cards are almost completely insignificant, so it often makes no difference whatsoever whether you hold eight or nine of clubs.

The trumps have Roman numerals. To me this seems more authentic for some reason than just numbers. The pictures show vaguely Eastern European countryside life. The cards are printed well and pictures have beautiful colours. The cards are slightly oversized compared to regular Bridge or Poker cards and of typical Piatnik quality.

This pack is identical to pack number 1936 except for the backs. 1936 has a subtle line pattern, this has baroque ornaments in blue and white. 1936 is my current favourite pack for 54 card games, and for all practical reasons 1935 is just as good.

Carta Mundi Jeu de Tarot - 78 Cartes. This pack has no identification number or other details, but the back pattern is called Versailles so if you search for that, you should be able to find a whole family of backs with the same design. The pattern is blue and gold floral design, but apparently there is also a red and gold variation available. I'm not sure if there's a red and gold tarot pack, though.

In any case, this is a full 78 card pack, that is 22 trumps and 56 cards otherwise. All cards bear indices in four corners; court cards have French indices (R, D, C and V). The trumps have what is apparently a French standard pictures, but here the pictures look better than in the other French tarot pack I have. The colours are better. The trumps are numbered with Arabic numerals.

Included with the pack are the rules and a scoring card for French Tarot. The card quality is excellent. This is a very good pack for playing almost any Tarot game and my standard suggestion to people who wish to buy exactly one Tarot pack and thus want maximum versatility.

We got a Wii last week. The final reason was Mario Kart Wii - it's one of my favourite series, I've enjoyed it on both GameCube and particularly on DS. The Wii version is the best, however, for several reasons.

Wii has been on our "to buy" list since it came out, it was obvious we would buy it at some point. It's the only console I'm at all interested in. PS3 and Xbox 360 have simply nothing at all to offer me, yet I've been quite intrigued by Wii. I don't care about flashy graphics or most games, I want clever gameplay and few choice hits I'm going to play a lot. Mario Kart Wii fits the bill, and I expect Wii Sports (bowling in particular but also tennis) to entertain me for quite a while as well.

Mario Kart Wii is a very good game. The gimmick is the Wheel, where you insert the Wii remote and then go driving. It's funny, it'll change your driving style a bit, but it works. It takes some getting used to, but I like it. It's not a cheap gimmick, but actually a rather pleasant way of driving.

There's some other new stuff as well. There are now bikes as well: 100 cc class is at first bikes only and 150 cc is bikes or karts. A local game critic didn't like the bikes, but I love them - right now if I have a choice, I'm riding a bike. They just work very well with my driving style.

The new tracks are fun, there are several rather clever and funny tracks in the new set and the recycled set is well chosen. Many favourites are back, with some new twists. The new tracks remind me of F-Zero GX at several places... There's plenty of speed and some pretty tough challenges. The latest version of Rainbow Road is just fiendish.

There's a ton of chaos in the game, it's much worse than before if you don't like it. There's 12 karts or bikes in each race and some new and nasty objects (POW blocks and the thunderclouds in particular), so there's trouble ahead! Winning races is hard at 150 cc, because someone's blasting you with shells or something all the time. Skip this game if you can't stand the chaos or are easily frustrated...

What really works is the online play. I tried online matches with DS, but that wasn't very good. There's little point in running four race competitions when your opponents are going to drop out as soon as they figure out you're better. Here it's just one race at a time, with up to 12 players. Players have rankings, and if you suck, you don't have to win to improve your rating (right now, I think if I only could make it fifth or so, I would improve my rating in most cases). That makes sure everybody has motivation to do their best all the time.

One feature I really like is ghost races. You can get a ghost run that's slightly better than your current record and try to beat that. That gives the game so much extra mileage. I used to do something similar with Tommy in F-Zero GX: we had an online leaderboard where we recorded our times. That competition kept me playing F-Zero GX for a long time after I had unlocked all the cups. Here it is built in the system. You can compete with your friends, find random opponents at your level, challenge the continental or world champion, race against staff ghosts, see how your times compare to other people... All very cool stuff, and everything works without any trouble at all.

So, I expect to play Mario Kart Wii for a long time, because the regular cups will offer more challenge than before and the online play will add to that. This all means the game is well worth the money and almost alone enough of a reason to get Wii.

I joined The International Playing-Card Society recently. I have little interest in participating the activities, but I was curious about Playing-Card, their journal. I received the three back issues of this subscription season yesterday and I'd say they're worth the money. I mean, I haven't subscribed to Counter, because I can read board game stuff online more than enough. However, The Playing-Card has material that isn't as easily available online.

There's tarot reviews in each issue. One of them pointed me to Tarot History, which is a web site about French Marseille tarot. They've recently published a beautiful new edition of Jean Noblet's Marseille tarot pack from 1650. It looks really great: it has the original line drawings and new, bright and beautiful colours. You can get a hand-made edition of the trumps as well (there are neat pictures of the colouring process).

I was pining for a copy of Pampas Railroads before. Not any more! There's talk of a reprint! It's P100 project, that is, if JC Lawrence can get 100 pre-orders, a reprint will be done. P100 for Pampas Railroads is where you sign up. The orders are at 40 or so at the moment, so it's going to happen, I believe. Pretty cool.

I just took a look at the final layout of my card game book. Now I only need to do the index and make the last check for mistakes, and it's done. The book goes to the printers about week from now. It's gorgeous - most of the card game books I've seen are pretty bland, but not this one.

The publisher decided to make it a large hardcover to avoid making it hundreds of pages long (the manuscript was bit on the long side). Now it's packed full of text and 240 pages. Also, it's pretty expensive, so it has to be hardcover to justify the price (of course it being a hardcover is one reason why it's expensive, but I'm sure there's some logic to all this). It gets better: I was hoping for few colour pages to show off some beautiful cards, but they'll print the whole book in four colours. So, there's plenty of colour all around.

The layout is very beautiful, Tarja Kettunen from BTJ did wonders on it. The book is - of course - red and black all over. I really, really like it. I'm quite proud of it, actually, as I think it's much better than my first book, and I'm very glad to see it treated this well by the publisher.

If anybody has a copy of Prairie Railroads, Veld Railroads or Pampas Railroads they're willing to sell, please let me know.

As if, but doesn't hurt to ask, does it?

Queen Games is expanding to Scandinavia, it seems, as I was just hired to translate their games to Finnish. It's funny how this internet thing works, you just get interesting job offers out of the blue!

Once somebody wrote to me and said he enjoyed my blog and asked if I'd like to write about games in this magazine he's editing. Well, that email got me a job as a columnist and has since lead to several magazine articles, two books and plenty of other interesting tasks (most recently setting up an internal wiki for a small publishing house!).

Now this! I'm translating Eketorp and Thebes. Eketorp seems like a rather splendid blind bidding game - somebody compared it to Edel, Stein & Reich on Geek, and that's one of the games I dislike the most - but Thebes is somewhat more interesting. Nice to see them come out in Finnish, anyway.

Before, I used to do "related games" in my Finnish game reviews by hand. That's boring and when you add a new review, deciding where to add the new game as related game is tedious. So, that needs automation. But how? I decided to do a two-part tagging system: theme and mechanics.

I did the theme part months ago. It was fairly easy, though took some time as I had about 170 reviews by then. Still, fairly simple, and the results were decent and in some cases quite good (tags like "Catan" or "abstract" worked quite well).

It took me until now to start on the mechanics. That's a lot harder. You can see it in the Geek, where the mechanics listed for game are usually missing or at least not quite good enough. And consider that I have now almost 200 reviews to tag... Well, some mechanics are easy, like "roll and move", "set collection", "auction", "trading" and so on, but others are much more complicated.

Take, for example, speed games. I first tagged these as "reaction games", which describes something like Halli Galli, but doesn't feel right for Ricochet Robot. So, I changed it to "speed games", while keeping "reaction games" for the likes of Halli Galli and Snorta! I had also tagged these as "simultaneous", but the simultaneous action in Sunda to Sahul is different from the simultaneous action in Diplomacy or Race for the Galaxy. So, one remains "simultaneous", while the other becomes "real time".

What about "modular board"? Catan has modular board, but what about Carcassonne or Tikal? The way I see it Carcassonne doesn't have a modular board, while Tikal does. The difference is that in Tikal, you actually play on the board that is grown, while in Carcassonne, you just lay tiles. Carcassonne is "map building".

Is "hex based" a good tag? Perhaps within wargames, but I don't think the fact that Catan is hex tiles and Tikal has hex tiles makes them really like each other in an interesting way.

It's not simple, tagging the games like this, but at least I have a clear goal: I want tags that help link similar games together. That helps a lot and gives me ways to tune the system, as I can work the tags until I see similar games grouped together.

About 800 euros worth of board games makes a big pile. It fills two big boxes. It's great to have delivery services that bring stuff to your door, with no extra costs. As it's rather wet and icy outside, I'm not sure I'd be alive (or, if not else, have all my bones intact) had I had to go and get the boxes from the post office.

Now I'll just have to everybody pick up their games before Nooa leaves his mark on them... He was sound asleep when the delivery man came (and he was sleeping really well, as all the noise from dragging the boxes didn't wake him up) and I was able to unpack the boxes without trouble. Now there's just a tiny, tiny problem: one of the boxes is full of packaging material and I'll have to shove all the games to the other box, otherwise they'll be out there for Nooa to enjoy...

StarCraft looks pretty nifty. It's certainly a big box. Agricola is one heavy game. Has anyone ever heard of Summertime? Well, Atro obviously has, but that was the first time I've ever heard of it...

Nooa is the cutest little gamer. He just loves to play with game boxes, trying to open them. His eyes just light up whenever he sees game boxes - particularly when I get some games in mail and there's a bunch of games lying on the floor, he'll go crazy. I'm wondering what's going to happen when our 900 euro game order arrives... He'll go completely bonkers, I believe.

Nooa also understands the word "lautapeli" (board game in Finnish). I was talking about games with Johanna, when Nooa jumped up, ran to the closet where I keep my games. I opened the door and he went and got Funny Fishing out - I keep it low in the closet so Nooa can reach it. He examined the pieces a bit, then promptly forgot about it.

Later I got him to collect the pieces and pack the game up. He closed the box (he still needs some practise with that, his style is cringe-inducing) and then went to put the game back to the closet - the game has a special spot there, Nooa will always put it in the right place (that's the thing with one-year olds, for them things belong to a certain place and they'll make sure everything's in the right place, most of the time...). Such a cute little gamer!