Mikko Saari on board games.
Earlier this year I decided to host a small game day for the contributors of Lautapeliopas. I ve been doing yoga, and the yoga school rents out the place. It s a lovely place and good for small gatherings. For the first game day on 16.5.2026 we ended up with 21 people attending, which was a very [ ]
For-Ex had the why on earth did you buy this game letter on back of the box. I m exactly the kind of person to buy a game after reading that. I played the original four times before passing it on. It was a weird game, hard to understand, and while it looked nice, it was [ ]
We played Guàn Dàn yesterday. John McLeod (of Pagat.com) was visiting Tampere recently and recommended this Chinese climbing card game to me. According to him, it s very popular in China right now. It has a couple of outstanding features among climbing games. It s a fixed partnership game like Tichu, and instead of counting points, it s [ ]
This has been a good week of games. We started with afternoon games on Monday. One player dropped out, so the original plan of a four-player game of Imperial turned into a three-player game of Indonesia. I had not played Indonesia with three before, so I was curious to find out how it works. Turns [ ]
This week has been good for board games. On Tuesday, I met a friend for a two-player game of 18GB: The Railways of Great Britain, and yesterday we played another game of Indonesia. Two-player 18GB is a fine 18xx experience for two. We played the E-W setup this time, cutting the board north of York. [ ]
I wanted to do a redraw of the Chicago NorthWestern board. I own the original Winsome Games edition. The Rio Grande version has a nicer board, though it s a bit plain and doesn t include the most obvious usability fix I wanted to include in my version. Let s start with the original version. It s usable, [ ]
We had a great game session yesterday. We played Indonesia! The appearance of the new third edition made me realize Indonesia would be a great match for my current game group, so I quickly reacquired a copy. I got the first edition, from a friend who upgraded to the third. We had full five players. [ ]
A friend suggested playing Wabash Cannonball, but when digging through my Winsome crate, I found Chicago NorthWestern. This John Bohrer design from 2016 was released by Rio Grande in 2023, so it s more widely available. It s a funny game. This is a cube rails game where railroad companies spread out west from Chicago. Everybody [ ]
18XX. This trend continued strong, with 16 plays of various 18XX titles. I was very happy with this. Now that we have over 30 plays with this group, I did some stats of the results. The most active players in our group (me, Aapo and Ville), do equally well: our average scores are 83-84% of [ ]
Thoughts on Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor, 18 BosWash and Ruben's Mini-Chips.