Gameblog

Thursday session: Tier auf Tier, Attika

2008-11-20T18:31:15Z

Actually, I'll start with another session report first. Wednesday we went to see some of our playground friends. The kids - 5 and 7 years - don't mind Nooa much, but they are all over me. Well, Nooa had great fun playing with their toys (Bob the Builder Duplos, a guaranteed hit) and I played some games with the kids. It was fun, if a tad chaotic.

We started with some roll and move games. Duck Pond, a Ravensburger game by Heinz Meister, was one of them. We played it wrong, and it was terribly boring. When played correctly it's still almost decision-free, but at least three times faster and thus much better. Players move ducks in a pond to pick up cards; we had each player controlling a duck, while actually everybody can move every duck. For four-year olds, but adults will be nevertheless be bored dead by this game.

Tier auf Tier aka Eläinpyramidi is my latest acquisition. This Haba game won the Finnish Game of the Year for kids this year and when I saw it for just 15,16 euros (a strange price), I had to buy it. It was a great purchase, as Nooa loved the game immediately. He was all over it, playing with the wooden animals.

It's a simple dexterity game for kids. Everybody gets a set of seven different animals, a crocodile is placed on the table and players take turns putting animals on top of the crocodile. If something falls, the player who made the mistake collects up to two animals and game continues until someone is out of animals. Simple and fun.

The kids weren't thrilled. We played a game, but they didn't want to try it again. They were really keen to play with the animal pieces, so that's what we did - it was fun, though I prefer actually playing the game. Well, maybe other kids like the game more. I sure did.

We did play the game today, while waiting for more players to arrive. When Hannu and Sonja joined us, the first thing they wanted to do was to try the animal game, so once more... And why not, because this is an excellent little dexterity filler. It only takes about 10 minutes, tops, and while the game is really simple, it's also rather entertaining enough. The dexterity part is fairly easy, until the pyramid gets tall - the pieces are quite slippery.

So, a top-notch game: a nice small box, really gorgeous components, really easy to teach, plays fast, works with (at least some) kids, is fun enough for adults to play without children - what else can you wish from a game that costs 15 euros? I just hope Nooa likes the game as much as he loves the bits.

Back to Wednesday. We also played Candy, which is a rather entertaining quick perception game. A bunch of multi-colored candy tokens are spread on a mat. Three colourful dice are rolled and the players must race to grab the piece of candy with the correct colours. Simple, yet fun.

Here's another game that suffered from not playing by the rules. We played until the very end, or would've except we had to leave. The rules suggest playing until someone gets five, and I can see why: as the pieces are taken, more and more rolls are blanks, pieces that are already taken. It gets a bit boring. But if the game stops at five, it works much better (and then you start again and play for best out of five or something like that if you want a longer game).

In any case, this is a good game for kids, nice practise to make the kids ready for more adult reaction test games. The publisher, Beleduc, seems to be one of those companies making quality children's toys and games, like Selecta and Haba. It's a German company, no surprises there... The components in this game were nice, the candy is wooden and the mat is nice cloth.

Then, today's games. After Tier auf Tier, we played a quick game of Dominion - the less said about my performance, the better - and after endless discussions of what to play, ended up playing a three-player game of Attika followed by a four-player game.

Attika is one of those fairly rare games I've played constantly - it, Gang of Four and Age of Steam form a trio of games I've played every year for six years now. Not much Attika for the last few years, true, but still - every time the game hits the table I'm reminded of how good it is. It's such an elegant game, my rating of 9 is definitely valid.

In the first game I showed the novices Petri and Hannu how to play, in the next one first Petri was really close to win by a temple connections and then Hannu did it, right out of the blue. I'm actually fairly sure Hannu will eventually buy a copy, he seemed to like the game a lot.

We wrapped up the evening with a quick game of Die Dolmengötter. I was on a roll, played well and eventually won the game with few points over Sonja. Hannu seemed certain Sonja would win and she did play a good game, but I knew I did well, too. Funny enough, only Petri was left with dolmens, so it was fairly close game.

I now have 11 games of Die Dolmengötter logged and I really like it. I'm seriously contemplating a 10 rating. If the game was as good with three or five as it is with four, a rating of 10 would be close to obvious. Now Die Dolmengötter is simply one of the very best 20 minute games for four, full of wonder and clever moves. My record is strong: I've won 7/11.

Ok, so I did it: Die Dolmengötter is now rated 10. It simply is that good.

Thursday session: Erie Railroad, Secret Blueprints

2008-11-14T13:13:22Z

When I arrived, the guys were waiting and hungry: it was Wabash Cannonball time. Hannu and Petri, the two main Wabash fans in our group wanted to give the new Erie Railroad expansion a go. KJ and Tapani, both newbies to Wabash, joined us for another five-player game.

The Erie is a small expansion. It's just a single-share company with, what, 13 cubes. Once a certain trigger is reached - railroads have expanded enough - Erie can be capitalized. It starts in Buffalo and has enough cubes to reach Chicago. It can also build to New York to grab eight income there. Simple, rules-wise, but this has plenty of subtle effects on the game.

Tapani played a rather excellent game for a newbie, beating us hands down. The final scores were 106-84-66-64-41. The Pennsylvania was distributed completely on the first round, after which the company headed straight to Chicago. That was brutal. Tapani and Hannu, winner and second, were both invested in Penn. So was Petri, but he played too carefully and didn't buy enough shares - he went most of the game with that single Penn share - and I was able to cut to the third place before him.

I ran the Chesapeake & Ohio on the southern edge of the map, taking it to Chicago with - who else but Tapani. Hannu got both Wabash and Erie, and played both of them well. Tapani did a great job with Baltimore & Ohio, too - he didn't develop it, so no shares where sold until late in the game.

Five-player Wabash is a tough beast. There aren't many actions per player, so choosing what you want to do is very critical. It also led to problems with certain not-so-useful yet very important actions, such as diluting B&O and Wabash. You want to see that done, but you'd rather use your own actions for promoting your agenda - so nobody does it.

Next I force the others play Secret Blueprints of Steam. This is a curious expansion that is unlike any other. Each player has a personal board. All boards are identical, except the layouts are mirrored and the cities have different colours.

Bidding and action selection is as usual, but building and moving goods happens simultaneously. Everybody builds on their own map and moves goods and announces the results. Very simple! The maps are kept secret from other players, mostly because of the Production action: instead of drawing the cubes from the cup, the player with the action announces a colour and everybody else must give a cube of that colour from their maps.

It's very solitaire-ish, but there's some interaction. The auction is still there - and more brutal, too, as First Move and First Build are not available and Urbanization is really important - and the Production gives some interaction, too. But it's a lonely game and loses lots of the good fighting there is in Age of Steam. However, whatever is lost is gained in time: our game took about 90 minutes, but that included some really serious thinking and newbie players. With experienced players, finishing a game in less than an hour is likely.

So, it's pretty neat, with few caveats. Total Age of Steam newbies and Secret Blueprints don't mix. Just don't do it. Also, if there's any reason to doubt the honesty of your fellow players, this just won't work. The same goes with mistakes, if somebody makes mistakes, it's impossible to notice or fix afterwards. But that's not a huge deal, really, in casual play, and I wouldn't worry about it much. Just, you know, teach the newbies with something that has a public map.

The results weren't really interested, I won hands down and that's it. What is interesting is that Hannu did learn something from the last week's session - his second place was as strong as my victory and he managed to build quite a track.

While Secret Blueprints didn't win everybody's heart, Age of Steam is still requested for next week. I'm more than happy to comply.

Rust went flying when four very rusty Die Dolmengötter players met. It's been a while from the previous game, but from now on Dolmengötter will return to my every-week game rotation. It's a bloody excellent game. (Ok, so I got a surprise victory here.)

A quick hand of Strohmann and a game of Dominion wrapped up a rather splendid afternoon of games.

Thursday session: Age of Steam, Dominion, Le Truc

2008-11-06T18:41:02Z

It's been too long from my last game of Age of Steam. Today I got some railroad action in the form of the Scotland scenario. So still no Secret Blueprints, unfortunately, but at least something!

I played against Hannu, who has played one game of Age of Steam, about year ago. He was a bit rusty, that is. I got two 2-link moves on the first round, which pretty much sealed the deal. I managed to build a nice track on the easy west coast of Scotland, then come down on the east coast. Hannu fought me a bit, but it was a pretty easy ride. At the same time, Hannu didn't quite realize the value of long connections. The final results were pretty clear.

This was a bit of an extreme case, but I'd still say the recommended eight turns is probably one turn too much. We finished the game one turn early (but could've quite probably two turns earlier, it was that obvious), and at that point the map was pretty much completely built.

Age of Steam isn't the most exciting two-player game there is, but this was certainly a fun way to spend 60 minutes or so.

Dominion is a hit. We played four games in a row, and that's rare. It was pretty fast, too, all were three-player games and moved fast. We used random setups every time and that worked well: we got some pretty interesting setups. Witch with no Moat or Chapel (but with Remodel) was interesting, but not as nasty as it could've been: we were all fairly high in positive points, even though the Curse pile ran out.

Thanks to a tip from the Board Game Society forums, I did some remodeling to the Dominion box insert. I cut the four bits that stick out from the bottom and removed few millimeters of the bottom edge. That way the insert is slightly lower in the box and the sleeved cards fit in better. Now it's just about excellent. The sleeves made the game more pleasant to play, I just like shuffling sleeved cards.

Dominion is excellent fun, now I just need to figure out how to win the game against non-newbies. We played four games and I wasn't really close in any of them...

I wrapped up the evening with some Strohmann-Tarock and Le Truc with Hannu. The tarock was a disaster, but the Truc game was really, really good. I won the first game 12-0, then lost 12-8 and finally won the decisive round 12-11. It was close, but I had good cards and nerves of steel.

Truc is an amazing game, but it takes a while to appreciate it. Random game with someone you don't know isn't going to make it. It gets much better once you play repeatedly against the same players and start to get inside your opponent's head a bit. Excellent fun, particularly with Hannu...

Someone should introduce Truc to all those poker pros who play Chinese Poker a lot for amazingly high stakes. That game's complete rubbish, after all... Truc is much less luck and much more bluffing, personality and skill. It's trick-taking, but I'm pretty sure most serious poker folks should see the shine.

Thursday session: Dominion, Container

2008-11-01T12:44:34Z

After a quick hand of Le Truc with Hannu, Petri arrived and Container hit the table. Petri is interested in modern-day business games and Container hits that niche pretty well. After all, the setting is definitely contemporary and the game is all about buying and selling.

This time I managed to avoid embarrassing blunders and actually everybody made pretty good money. When we started, the guys were slightly confused, but figured out the works before the game was over. I think my one-game experience gave me enough of a head start to win the game, but Petri got close (115 vs 92). Hannu had the wrong colours of containers floating around and lacked cash in critical times (and didn't realize to take a loan), and ended up with 56 points.

Three isn't probably the sweet spot of Container - I think more is better, as there's more action going around, but the game works this way, too. It was a pretty fast, too, clocking in at 60 minutes. Petri loved the game and Hannu seemed to enjoy it, too. My rating is also on its way from 7 to 8.

Thursday's board game club was a Dominion party, pretty much. I played three games of Dominion during the afternoon, first two times in a row and then a third game just before leaving with some other folks.

It's a popular game, let me tell you. Ok, everybody didn't love it, but the game got some "I've got to have this" response, which is after all fairly rare. In the first game we used the basic setup and I beat everybody else hands down, in the second one we tried a randomized setup and things were much closer. Hannu won that one. I tried using a Chapel and didn't do it quite efficiently enough, but it was an interesting experiment. In the last game we used the Village Centrum (or whatever it's called in English - the difficulty with translations...) setup which was nice, too.

I'm enjoying the game more and more. I've still got it rated as eight, but nine is probably closer to truth. The game has plenty of potential, but the question is will it become stale? The designer has played it a lot, which would suggest there's enough staying power. Well, I'll just have to see and I'm definitely going to enjoy the game for now!

By the way, I just sleeved the game today. Based on some of the complaints, it would seem like a really difficult task, but I got the Ultra Pro basic soft sleeves, 1,50 euros per pack, and put the cards in those. The cost was minimal, the size of the cards matches the sleeves well enough, the sleeved cards fit in the insert and the box lid can be shut. Works like a charm, that is.

I also played a game of Russian Preference, a three-player favourite of me and Hannu. We got Gargoyle, another friend of the game, to join us. It was another reminder of why I don't play games for money. I lost badly: 130, 99, -229. I was deep in the hole after the fairly quick game was over.

Despite my terrible performance, I still really like the game. It's one of the better traditional card games and my favourite when there are exactly three players around.

Board game club: Dominion, Container

2008-10-28T15:44:23Z

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.

Dominion and Gathering Storm

2008-10-25T10:59:57Z

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.

Finnish Players' Picks 2008

2008-10-23T05:20:48Z

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.

Current affairs

2008-10-17T09:45:04Z

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!

It's Essen time again

2008-10-17T04:04:00Z

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.

Games at Jyväskylä: Mahjong, Agricola

2008-10-12T07:31:26Z

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.

Definition of skill in games

2008-10-03T11:07:34Z

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.

Thursday session: Riichi again

2008-09-26T11:15:29Z

After a quick round of Da Vinci Code, it wasn't hard to get a Mahjong table going. There were more than four interested players.

We used the new set I had bought. It's a cheap set, made in China but Japanese in style. That means it's small (the tiles seemed very small the first time I saw them, but after playing with them a little, I think they're actually all right and not that small), there are no western indices, the white dragons are blank and there is one red five in each suit.

The lack of indices was a bit of a problem. I think it's one of those things you learn with practise (and it's a lot easier task than learning the Shogi pieces, for example, since you only need to learn the characters and winds, and few of the characters are really easy, too) and I also think it's something mahjong players should learn at some point. We had cheat sheets, of course. I think it slowed our game a bit, but not much. Don't let the lack of indices stop you from getting an otherwise cool set.

Anyway, since we had a Japanese set, we played riichi. We played for almost three hours and almost finished the game. A full game of riichi is two rounds or eight hands, but there can be more if there are draws or dealers win hands. We played 11 hands in total, I think, and were two hands (+ extra hands) away from finishing the game.

It was swingy, like riichi is. I think I scored the biggest hand in the game, for 11 600 points, but in the next hand I made a mistake that cost me 12 000 points, since I had to pay 4 000 points to other players for an incorrect winning hand. So, after few more failures I ended up dead last.

Few more words about the set. I bought it from MahjongMart (it's the white/yellow Dragon set), because it was dirt cheap. Of course, as usual, cheap means "low quality". The material is nice, but you can smell - from quite a distance - that it's made cheaply in China. The tiles are fine, but the case reeks. Hopefully it'll get better.

The carvings are decent, but the paint job isn't very good. The colours have been applied with a wide brush, it's not very exact work. Again, that's what to expect from a cheap set, really. The biggest problem colour-wise is the bamboo tiles. They are not green, but more like really dark brown.

So, if you want a cheap Japanese-style set, it's a valid option, but I'd probably suggest investing a bit more to get a nicer set. After all, it's going to be something you'll use for years. I actually sold the Dragon set already and have ordered this riichi set from Yellow Mountain Imports. Based on the pictures, it looks nicer: the colours are bright, clear and exactly applied. It's not very expensive, either, just $47, but the shipping costs were a lot more expensive. Apparently shipping stuff from Japan is fairly cheap. Of course, US folks will be fine since Yellow Mountain Imports is in USA and the shipping starts from $11.

Oh, by the way - remember my Board Game Auctions site? It's been doing great. People are really shopping for games in eBay. Old mahjong sets have been the biggest bestsellers there (and since they're often quite expensive, the commissions are good), but I've also made some money from old war games.

Since that site is doing so well, I thought I'll expand to other niches and now I'm seeing how Kids' Stuff Auctions will do. For that site I'm still waiting for Google to get to it and start bringing people in (which is, of course, part of the reason I'm mentioning it here, because Gameblog's front page is well-loved by Google - and why not!).

Back to New England

2008-09-21T17:13:06Z

I visited board game club today for a while. I had to leave early, but I did have time for a round of New England Railways. We got five players and this time, since I was carrying Age of Steam as well, we replaced the cardboard chits with actual wooden cubes. It was much better.

This time the results were slightly different than in our last session. Tero won with $65, Olli had $19, I had $9, Outi had $4 in the red and Robert was $14 in the negative. So, no debt death spirals, but no really good results either. Even Tero had some debt left and he was the only one to pay any debt at all.

The shortness of the game - just half of the three-player game - is obviously one reason. We also had a nasty case of plenty of blue cubes in the main network and no access to blue cities. An earlier link to the blue cities on the edge of the board would've increased the incomes, I believe.

My own game was bad... I got a bad start and took many, many turns to get any income (I didn't buy a link on the first turn, then bought two useless unconnected links, way to go!). I was tight on the loans, so in the end that didn't hurt too much, but it was somewhat boring.

It was fun, or at least fun enough, but I don't think I'm playing the game again with five players any time soon. Someone might enjoy this - or even play with six players, but I prefer the three-player game with more turns and more time to enjoy your network. Four-player game might be the best, I'll have to try and see. But five's too much for me, that I know.

Thursday session: New England Railways

2008-09-19T16:01:00Z

My Thursday games started with a quick 2-0 loss in Truc and a four-player game of Race for the Galaxy. It's been a while since I played Race, but I was in good form and able to win (ok, so we had two newbies in the game).

The main course for me was, however, Winsome's New England Railways. I was able to score a copy from Northumbria Games earlier this year and now the game got on the table. I'm glad to say it's a really good game and clearly the best of the bunch I got (West Riding and Dutch Intercity were the other two).

This Early Railways game is an ancestor Age of Steam and shares some ideas: players build railroads on loaned money and move goods to get income. However, there are some big differences as well. The track-building isn't freeform: there are set connections between cities auctioned each turn. The loans are more expensive, but they can be paid off.

The loans cost 20% each round, like in Age of Steam, but they feel more expensive. In Age of Steams, shares pay 5 and cost 1 per round, while in New England Railways loans start from 10 and cost 2, and it's not rare to have, say, $100 in loans that costs you $20 per round in debt service. Income, however, is usually less than in Age of Steam. I found that going over 40 income was possible, but staying there for more than one round was hard.

So, ending up in a deadly debt spiral is fairly easy. In our game, it was common to take new loans to pay the debt service on old loans. In that sense our game was a fairly accurate simulation of typical debt-based economy.

Me and new guy Tuukka were more heavy-handed with our debt, while Tuomas was more careful. The difference between me and Tuukka was the health of our railroad networks. I got the best network and after Tuomas' strong few rounds I was in the lead. Tuukka, on the other hand, took a while to get any income. The result? I was deep in debt but in the end of the game I had paid all my debts and I got $110 in cash. Tuukka was deep in debt and in the end was even more in debt, finishing the game with $294 in the red. Tuomas paid off almost all his debts, ending up with $34.

Add to that the value of the network, and the final scores were 180 for me, 114 for Tuomas and -240 for Tuukka. In this light the mercy of going honestly bankrupt seems welcome... My victory was a result of a good network. I had a strong network : Boston, Providence, Worcester, Plainfield, Hartford, New Haven... I also got plenty of income from Tuukka, as my network connected well with his network. Tuomas had a nice network, but had a bit of a lack of good cubes to ship and support from Tuukka. Lesson learnt: a good, central network is a key to victory, and getting help from friends is nice.

New England Railways has a nice income reduction mechanism, by the way. Each round two dice are rolled. Each player loses 1/(2d6 +1) of his or her income, rounded down. It's a nice mechanism, less gamey than the income reduction tiers in Age of Steam. There's some randomness involved, but it hits everybody equally (relative to their income levels). We had few depression rounds when I rolled 3 or so - I lost 11 income twice. That hurt, since getting income was a lot harder than in Age of Steam - I made few 5-link shipments, but mostly shipped three links or so.

So, New England Railways is a really good game. It's similar to Age of Steam, but different enough. I definitely want to explore this game a tad more. Our session took a nice 1 hour 45 minutes. Of course the production quality is typical Winsome level, but using poker chips and wet-erase pens helped and replacing the low-quality goods chips with wooden cubes would help even more.

Another new project of mine: Mahjong-opas

2008-09-13T08:00:25Z

Since the Finnish mahjong resources are so scarce, I wanted to fix that. Thus, Mahjong-opas was born. Currently the site has some basic information on mahjong and the rules to the Chinese Official game and Riichi, but more will come - while it probably won't be another Sloperama Mahjong FAQ, I'm interested in developing this site a lot. That means lots of writing, but it'll be fun.

My timing is pretty good, as the anime/manga/Japan kids are starting to discover mahjong, thanks to Akagi, a manga (and an anime) about mahjong. It's the Hikaru no Go effect all over again.