Gaming
aardvarchaeology | January 24, 2013Junior and I met this guy in the line to the EuroGamer Expo in London last September. Anybody know him?
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2013Here are the ten boardgames I played the most over a year with about one gaming session a week.
Innovation (2010)
7 Wonders (2010)
For Sale (1997)
Glory to Rome (2005) *
Lost Cities (1999)
Verräter (1998) *
Pergamon (2011, reviewed here) *
Telestrations (2009) *
Last Night on Earth (2007) *
Wok Star (2010) *
These are mostly short games that you can play repeatedly in one evening. The longer games that we played more than twice were Last Night on Earth and Yggdrasil. I played 74 different boardgames in 2012. Looking back since mid-2008, the number is 171.
Stats courtesy of Boardgame Geek.…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2012Beer & Vikings – of course I had to review this new Italian boardgame, the follow-up to 2011's Sake & Samurai in the “Spirits & Warriors” series. Let me say at the outset that the game art shows little influence from actual Viking Period material culture and the text shows little influence from Old Norse literature. This is a humorous game about Conanesque barbarians with beards and a mighty thirst. I accept this point of departure and will look at the game's qualities within the given parameters.
The game is played with cards and tokens. The winner is the player whose character…
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2012This past weekend saw my third annual boardgaming retreat: 48 hours in good company at a small Nyköping hotel during the slow season, all meals included. Me and my buddy Pieter took a walk upriver to the first bridge and back past the castle ruin late on Saturday night, but otherwise I spent my waking hours in the gaming/dining room.
I played eleven sessions of nine different games. To give you an idea of how popular each individual game is, I've included its current BGG rank. For instance, Indonesia's “98th” means that right now there are only 97 board games that the largely US-based users…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2012
Fazer's old packaging
Fazer has removed the cartoon East Asian from one of two versions of the packaging for their chocolate-covered puffed rice. Only the conical straw hat remains, an "abbreviated motif" as Karl Hauck would have put it. Tørsleff still has the guy on their gel agent. Gabob recently published the fine boardgame Wok Star which is full of cartoon East Asians.
Tørsleff's gel agent
Thinking about these images, I've decided that I don't find them racist. The old Fazer and Tørsleff cartoons are certainly outdated, since few people in East Asia wear conical straw hats or queue…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2012I don't like the loud rattle of dice or the way they careen across the table, scattering game markers and ending up on the floor. And so I've been thinking about buying a dice tray. With low walls and a soft interior surface, it solves both problems. When my friend Foaad gave me a huge gift certificate at Dragon's Lair, one of Stockholm's best board and card game stores and the only one to my knowledge which offers gaming tables, I decided it was time.
Check out my beautiful new handmade dice trays! Per Landberger makes these without even being an underpaid Third World sweat shop worker. And…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2012Spent a week gloriously off-line at my mom's glorious summer house in the archipelago. Oh the joy of reading 300 pages for fun in one day without feeling the need to check e-mail! Here are the books I read:
Invented Knowledge. False history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Ronald H. Fritze 2009. One amazing essay covers the scifi con-man religion Nation of Islam. Did you know that Louis Farrakhan started out as a calypso singer, and that George Clinton's Mothership was a concept borrowed from NoI mythology?
Falling Free. Lois McMaster Bujold 1988. Charming fast-paced scifi. Four-armed…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2012
Played Eclipse for the first time with my new Muscovite friends Anton & Maria and frequent guest Swedepat. This Finnish 2011 boardgame has become a runaway international hit and is currently ranked #7 on Boardgame Geek. It's about interstellar colonialism: good fun, very neatly designed, and has a lot of inherent replayability. I look forward to future games. Guess which player ended up way ahead of the cluster of three stubble-chinned losers at the end...
Cycled in brisk & sunny weather for a second attempt at two recalcitrant geocaches. Found nada. How the great have fallen.
Had…
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2012There are some good archaeology-themed boardgames out there. None depict archaeology as an activity directed towards the gaining of knowledge. Let's look at the top three on Boardgame Geek.
Tikal has a pretty absurd premise. A number of archaeological expeditions reach an area of jungle-covered ruins in the Yucatan peninsula at the same time and realise to their surprise that they all have permits to dig in the same region. The expedition leaders react to this coincidence by ordering an all-out plunderfest where everybody tries to get as much fine loot as possible, employing the locals as…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2012When I was a kid I enjoyed playing the 1984 computer war game Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. Last spring I visited Tiger Hill in Suzhou where there is a small temple to the great strategist's memory.
The game is good fun, not least thanks to the scenario editor that was years before its time and allowed an unusual level of creativity. However, my friend David and I eventually discovered an "exploit" that pretty much ruined the game for us. Here's what we did.
The game keeps track of each troop unit's fatigue level. Fresh troops fight way better than tired ones. What we found out was a way to…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2011When a buddy of mine learned that I keep stats on the boardgames I play, she said, "If I didn't know you, Martin, I'd say you probably suffered from Asperger's syndrome." But hey, Boardgamegeek.com has a nifty book-keeping function, and I enjoy keeping notes! Here are the ten games I've played the most during 2011, all highly recommended.
For Sale
Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation
Bohnanza
Small World
7 Wonders
Lost Cities
Pandemic
Magic: the Gathering
Innovation
Death Angel
These are mostly shorter games as such have a greater likelihood of getting played several times in one evening.…
aardvarchaeology | December 20, 2011Place is a new Swedish boardgame, the first offering from Spelmakarna i Sverige Ltd who are based near my home. After reading about their product in the local paper, I asked them for a review copy, which they kindly delivered to my doorstep. (No, we're not acquainted.)
It's a geographical trivia game with five main parameters contributing to who wins.
1. The ability to recognise scenic places worldwide from pictures
2. The ability to place them correctly on the world map
3. The ability to answer trivia questions about the places
4. The ability to remember the answers to the questions
5. Blind…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2011
I spent yesterday in good company at the FlemCon 2 gaming convention organised by the S.M.A.S.H. gaming society at Södertörn University College. Juniorette was at a friend's house and Junior is too cool for small cons these days.
Left you see me emoting the "nature red in tooth and claw" competitive theme of Dominant Species, a fun though somewhat drably produced 2010 boardgame about natural history. I played the mammals and got resoundingly beaten by the arachnids. For you gamers out there, Dominant Species is worker placement, no hidden information, hardly any book-keeping or resource…
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2011
Though I played a lot of tabletop role playing games in the 80s and 90s, I've never been much of a live action role-player (LARPer). Just seems to be way too much preparation for such short events. So the only real LARP I ever took part in was in May of 1992 (it was called Saturday Night Live, ha-ha-ha) - until this past Sunday, when I tried again. And it was fun!
Boardgaming buddies head-hunted me for this extremely well organised LARP because they had a male deficit. The event was titled Kärlek och fördel, "Love and Advantage". The idea was basically to collect all the main characters…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2011
My buddy Oscar doesn't like roughing it at gaming conventions, sleeping on classroom floors, eating cup noodles etc. So for two years now he's organised civilised boardgaming weekends where he's gotten a bunch of gamers together and booked a small hotel for us (here's about last year's). It's 48 hours of gaming in good company with meals and nice rooms, all for a very reasonable off-season price. This past weekend. I played sixteen sessions of thirteen different games, as follows.
Innovation. Card game out of MIT, nominally about the rise of civilisations, where the cards keep interacting…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2011
So yeah, Kickstarter now offers you the opportunity to back a card game set in a Lovecraftian girl school.
Via Kenneth Hite.
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2011Listening to the Dice Tower and Spiel podcasts and reading forum entries on Boardgame Geek, I've come across two central aspects of US boardgaming culture that have me kind of baffled. One is the ubiquity of open-to-all gaming groups, and the other is the emphasis on the FLGS, the Friendly Local Gaming Store.
*
To begin with the gaming groups, to me gaming is something I do with my friends at our houses - usually mine. The varying cast of gamers having tea at my table once a week are my guests. A recent Dice Tower episode (#205), however, featured a long discussion about what to do if your…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2011
Dungeon Crawl as Subway Punk-Gang Standoff
Everybody knows what a dungeon game is. There's this underground complex of rooms and corridors, stocked with traps and secret doors, treasures and meanies to guard them. And you are a member (or all of the members) of a Tolkienesque band of vagabonds who descend into the underground, torch in one hand and sword in the other, in search of their fortune. Dungeons & Dragons, DungeonQuest, Descent...
Cave Troll is not that kind of game. Sure, the board depicts an underground complex full of treasure, and you do play a band of adventurers. But there…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2011
I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids.
When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, whom I do not hesitate to call a genius and an Elder God, has written a Lovecraftian poem on the same theme (in all likelihood quite independently of that 1986 pewter giggle-shudder item). Hear Norm perform the poem on the Drabblecast's Christmas Special!
'Twas the Night
By Norm Sherman
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the edifice…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2010Yesterday my buddy Swedepat showed up at 13:30. (That's his name to help distinguish him from Irish Pat.) I hadn't been able to find a third or fourth gamer on short notice. But our plan was to try out the new games in my house, and we started off with Juniorette's Christmas present, Forbidden Island. Of course she wanted to play too, and her mother joined in just to be sociable.
I'm a geek living with, not a jock girl, but more kind of a hipster. My wife's a journalist who's into fashion and literature and fancy cooking. A good thing about East Asian families is that they appear to teach…