Category: Snippets

Now this has definitely got me interested.

New from Days of Wonder, a family game that includes a true, three-dimensional palace that players compete to build. A game by Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc.

See the preview page here.

I very much enjoy Bruno Faidutti’s game descriptions and appraisals. They’re normally not too far from my own. Sometimes, he doesn’t need to say very much to get the message across.

I’m glad I got Diabolo a few days ago and am looking forward to playing it a lot.

I’ve just received the new Wolfgang Kramer & Michael Kiesling game, Celtica, in my latest Adam Spielt order. We’re itching to try it (hopefully Friday) and so I’ve done a quick translation and posted it to BGG, if anyone’s interested. The Celtica page is here.

Looks fairly light but there are a few interesting tactical decisions necessary and I think it will go down pretty well with our group.

I’ve just added a session report for the new game from local designer, Debbie Keigan, to my Trickylight website. You can read the report here.

Just added the latest session report to my Trickylight site:

“Our first session of 2006 and I decided to try Antike, which has been described as a two hour Civilization game. It was designed by Mac Gerdts and published by eggertspiele. It scales from 2 to 6 players, which is good because we are often struggling to find good 6 player games.”

You can read the full report here

I don’t normally go in for choosing a top 10 of the year but, after browsing a few of these over recent days, I was intrigued to see if my choices were close to what others thought. The following are the list of games I have gained the most enjoyment from in 2005. They are not meant to reflect the most deserving releases of 2005 (and indeed one is a 2004 release that I only first got to play in 2005), but they are the ones that made the best impression on me. So here, in alphabetical order, as I would struggle to place these in order of preference, are my picks of 2005:

Australia
Beowulf – The Legend
Caylus (despite our 5 player game running too long)
Havoc: The Hundred Years War
Hazienda
Kreta
Louis XIV
Shadows Over Camelot
Tower of Babel
Verflixxt!

I’m sure the rest of the Shrewsbury Games Club will concur with my choices. If not, they can always tell me where I went wrong in the comments section.

Let’s hope 2006 brings more excellent releases along the lines of these 10.

I’m a bit late in noticing this but the Piddinghoe Gamers have just launched a blog on their website here.

The latest entry about the price of poker chips and their downward spiral is pretty upsetting. It rubs in the fact that I bought my set 18 months too early at a very steep price when you could only get decent looking chips online. Now, of course, you can get poker chips everywhere on the high street (albeit not as good quality) and the sellers of quality chips have had to drop their prices accordingly.

I’ll just go and sulk in the corner for a couple of hours.

The latest issue of Counter dropped through the letterbox today.

Weighing in at a healthy 84 pages, there is plenty of discussion about the Essen Games Fair, even an article from Derek Carver contrasting the fair of 20 years ago with that of today. Added to that are oodles of reviews and the usual letters section, which means I’ve got plenty to read over the next few days.

My latest Bitz Quiz has been added to my Trickylight site.

Like previous quizzes, this is just for a bit of fun – there are no prizes on offer, simply the pride in getting all of them right (No chance!) Unlike previous quizzes, there is no need to send me your answers or wait a month for them to appear on the site. Just a click on a button will make everything clear.

Although you don’t need to e-mail me with answers, I’m still very keen to get feedback on the quiz. Is it too hard, too easy, any problems with the images? There is a link to my e-mail address on the quiz page or you can comment here.

Bitz Quiz 6, together with all the older ones, can be found here.

With luck, I should have a new Bitz quiz on my Trickylight site tomorrow. There will be 20 brand new bitz to spot.