I created a couple of “Mikko’s best years of games” geeklists in 2020 and 2021. I remembered those lists yesterday and created an update – this is an easy list to create, so it didn’t take me more than a few minutes to create the new list. You can see the whole list in BoardGameGeek. Here’s the comment track: 2015 and 2016 stay at the top. Both got more points, but their difference remains the same. 2015 is the year of Dale of Merchants and Monikers; 2016 is A Feast for Odin, Great Western Trail, Tyrants of the Underdark and Flamme Rouge. 2017 makes a big leap to the third place due to a chan ..read more

I’ve owned 1829 Mainline for a decade now. My initial motivation for buying it was to support Francis Tresham, as I had bought most of my 1825 stuff second-hand. I played Mainline once with Nooa in 2015, but it has gathered dust since. Yesterday, we finally played the game. We had three players: me, Nooa (now nine years older and almost an adult!) and Ville from our game group. All are fast players, so I expected the game to move pretty swiftly, and we finished the game in just three and a half hours. Francis Tresham is the father of the 18xx genre – a genre that’s 50 years old this year! – an ..read more

Another more quiet year. 2023 was another quiet year. The number of plays and the hours spent were slightly up from 2022, but if I remove the single most played game from those numbers, the numbers are about the same or slightly smaller than in 2022. This is clearly the new normal. More new games. I stopped avoiding new games as much as in 2022, and the numbers shot up: I played about 50 new games in 2023. That includes some traditional card games but also lots of new games. That was fine. I wasn’t as reluctant to try new games, but I attempted to get more plays to games I’ve tried. I got a fe ..read more

I’m currently at 27 plays of Forest Shuffle. The short version: it’s great. Forget about the balance gripes. It doesn’t matter unless you’re the kind of person intensely annoyed by game balance problems. Sure, sometimes you get lopsided games, but they’re quickly over. I’ve had many games with nail-biting finishes where the end game is a frantic race for points before the game is over. I’ve tried once with four players; the game was over too soon. I like the two-player game better; it gives you more time to develop your forest. With more experience, I might enjoy the four-player game more. Pla ..read more

Horseless Carriage is the latest title from Splotter. It’s a game about the early automobile business. Players try to determine what features customers want in their cars and then produce cars to fulfil those needs. Mechanically, there’s a spatial puzzle of laying out your factory to build the cars with the necessary features and another challenge of trying to manipulate the market where the customers are. It’s all reasonably challenging. The cool part about the factory puzzle is that it is not limited by money. It’s all about space: your factory floor has minimal space, and the key to succes ..read more

I’ve been interested in Forest Shuffle for a while and have even considered buying the game. People on a Finnish board game Discord started talking about the game being unbalanced, which sounded terrible, so I gave the game a go on BGA. It’s the deers and wolves combo, and sure enough, in my first game, I lost by 150 points to a player who used that strategy (I tried using it, but my opponent got all the deers). I tried again and collected lots of deer and wolves to win by 100 points. So yes, I can see how that could sour the game for some people. I’m not sure yet. I like what the game does ..read more

SpellBook by Phil Walker-Harding and Space Cowboys. I received a review copy from Asmodee Nordics. Elevator pitch: SpellBook is a race of collecting magical resources, using them to unlock spells and then using those spells to unlock more spells. What’s in the box? There’s a bunch of spell cards and a familiar board for each player, a storage board, a bowl for resources, and lots of magic material tokens. The tokens are not cardboard, but clear acrylic with a picture layer in the middle. I haven’t seen that before, and I like it: it looks as good as cardboard tokens but feels better. The a ..read more

I did another edition of my Top 100 list. This was the first list with the new BGG GeekList sorting system, where I can assign a rank for each item and have BGG rank them in descending order. That’s very nice for these top 100 lists. The number of comments the list received has been much lower than in previous years. I did get a complaint that the list should be a top 20 list because it’s full of games I don’t like. That reflects my thinking on games and is valuable as such, but considering this feedback and the general lack of feedback, it’s possible this will be the last list. Ten years for ..read more

Here are some random notes on games I’ve played recently. Xiangqi and Shogi. Thanks to a book project, I’ve returned to Chinese and Japanese chess. I tried both about 15 years ago, but those were just single attempts. Now I’ve delved slightly deeper, thanks to a son who is keen to explore these games with me. Both of these are fine games. Xiangqi is smaller and faster and often an exciting battle with interesting manoeuvres on both ends of the board. Shogi builds up slower but remains very interesting even in the very end, as the drop rule where captured pieces can return to play keeps the gam ..read more

I’m usually not interested in new games, but apparently, I can be persuaded. Something in Earth attracted me; I’m not sure what it was. I checked the rule book, which seemed complicated at first sight, and then went and learnt the game. It’s not that tricky, really. It’s a game of many cards, tableau building and card combinations. There are four actions you repeat until someone finishes their 4×4 tableau, and then you total up the scores to see who won. This is easy to teach, but of course, the cards mess things up a little, and the initial impression of the game is very messy and fiddly. Bu ..read more