It’s a fixed partnership game like Tichu, and instead of counting points, it’s about going out first and uses a Sheng Ji scoring system based on promotions. Each team starts on level 2 and as they win rounds, they get promoted. Eventually they reach the levels 10, J, Q, K and A, and if they win on level A, they win the game. You don’t need to count points, the main thing that matters is that one of the team members goes out first. When the second team member goes out then affects how many promotion steps the team gets, so that’s important too.

The game is played with a double deck, which is dealt out completely. That means you start the game with a 27-card hand. Yes, that is bonkers. It takes a while to sort your cards, and it’s difficult to take in everything in your hand.

The combinations are small. You can play single cards, pairs, triplets, full hands, five-card straights (but not longer!) or six-card tubes (three consecutive pairs) and plates (two consecutive triplets). The only bigger combinations are bombs, which are at least four cards of the same number, but can be up to ten cards. The other bombs are a five-card straight flush and all four jokers.

One team is always the declarers. Their current score is the level of the hand. The cards that match the level are the highest single cards after the jokers, and the hearts of that number are wild cards, which can be used as any card except the jokers. If we’re on level 7 and declarers, the card rank is red joker, black joker, 7, A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and the 7s of hearts are wild.

If you like bombs in Tichu, here you get to bomb a lot more. You don’t always get a bomb in your hand, but often you have, perhaps more than one, and having a low bomb isn’t all that great. I’m not surprised this game is called “throwing eggs”, where “egg” and “bomb” both sound like “dàn” in Chinese.

This is a longer game. Our game took nine rounds and two hours, so almost 15 minutes per round. It was the first play for everyone and there was a pub quiz going on at the same time, so I assume it’s going be a bit faster in the future. But shuffling, dealing and sorting your hand will always be a bit slow. The game also has rules where you can fall from level A to level 2, which is brutal, and I’m not at all surprised there are variant rules to change that total reset to a smaller fall. The game is already long enough!

I quite liked this. More than Tichu? I’m not sure. Tichu feels like a really lean game compared to Guàn Dàn. The very large hands are clumsy and a little annoying, but on the other hand, navigating that initial 27-card mess is an interesting challenge. I’m looking forward to playing this more.

Also posted on Mastodon. Guàn Dàn rules in Finnish.

Turns out it’s good. The three-player game is different, and my favourite is either four or five – don’t know yet – but I would definitely not say no to a three-player game. The game runs longer, which changes the dynamics of it. It’s also very interesting to see how differently things can develop. This time, no spice companies were started on the first round, leading to quick initial city growth. The Halmahera shipping company was never started, which changed the shipping layout.

I was happily ahead in the early game. A friend complained they had lost the game, badly, and guess who won? They didn’t realize they were running away with the game until I told them.

I’ve been wondering how useful the 100× turn order bid multiplier is. Now, I would’ve needed that. I was badly hurt by the turn order on what turned out to be the last turn. I bid 10,000 for the turn order on the last turn – and I only had the 25× multiplier! – and the second player bid 10,025 and ran away with the Siap Saji market. With the 100× multiplier I could’ve bid 40,000 and that would’ve secured me a much better position.

I think it’s a brilliant idea that the money spent on bidding for turn order counts for your final score.

Tuesday was the casual group, and we continued with Bomb Busters. It’s a lovely co-op game, and the challenge is delightful now that we have the correct rules and it’s not too easy. We still managed to pass all seven missions. Next week, we’ll get into new territory and hopefully somewhat harder missions.

Wednesday was the main game group day, and we played 18Korea with five players, including one total 18xx newbie. We gave him a very quick rules explanation (ten minutes or so), and off we went. What’s better than throwing new players right at the deep end? I was sure he could swim, and swim he did.

Everybody knows it’s possible to buy trains from all companies, and not just your own. But have you ever seen that happen? I’ve played 18xx games a lot and have never seen that, but in this game it did! I managed to sell one of my 5E trains to a company looking for a permanent train. The buyer was the new guy so I suppose the ethical side of it is slightly dubious, but I’m ready to defend my actions – I thought it was a real win-win scenario, I was already winning by a lot, and we were cross-invested. Mostly I was just happy to see a train purchase across players.

We had Rason among the initial Northern Korea companies. We have a meta where Rason is considered the best early company. The player who started it would’ve been a bit poor without help and we could’ve just not invest in it, but I’ve been in a situation where Rason makes a ton of money – 300–400 on OR 1.2 – and I don’t have any shares, so I didn’t want to repeat that. So, we funded Rason. The shares were split 4-3-2-1 or so, and I got three, so I was happy. In the end, Rason wasn’t a great company. After the initial burst, it defected to South and got good tokens, but it had to withdraw a lot. I sold my shares at the right time and even thought it ran for 1170 at the end, it was a very low value share.

I started Sinuju on the first SR and even though it had a slow start, it had the Long Distance Specialist asset (pays 20 won extra per tile for the longest run on each OR), and that made me a ton of money during the game, making funding trains easier.

We’ve played seven games of 18Korea so far. The first one was a bit of a bust and ended before the war, so it doesn’t really count. Of the other six, I’ve won five. For some reason, I’m better in 18Korea than in most other 18xx games (or the other players make more mistakes in 18Korea). This game was mostly close – I won clearly with 8,188 won, but the other four players were all within 572 won (6,280 to 6,852 won). The difference between the fourth and the fifth place was just 4 won, which is practically a tie.

Originally posted on Mastodon.

Two-player 18GB is a fine 18xx experience for two. We played the E-W setup this time, cutting the board north of York. This is a curious setup, as the generally congested area between Manchester and York now only has one company, Midland, while the rest of the companies are more on the south edge of the map. The game feels different. I was in a strong lead, but for some reason, my lead evaporated and in the end, I lost slightly. That was good, as we noticed we had missed the rusting of the 4+2 trains – I was the only one to have them, so had I won, it would’ve been with a strong asterisk.

I want to play more 18GB, and playing the two-player game more would be welcome. Our game took under three hours, which was nice, considering my opponent was playing his first game and isn’t the fastest player in our group (with my son, we’ve played a two-player game in under two hours).

Indonesia was awesome. It was our first play with the third edition. It’s a good improvement over the first edition and looks very nice. I would prefer the player bank sheets had the turn structure instead of the screens because we play with open money and don’t use the screens. I think I’ll do some smaller turn structure cards – those won’t be needed for long, but for now are helpful. I also have ordered replacement tokens for the glass bead cities, I’m not a huge fan of those. Having ships in player colours is a nice improvement.

I did pretty well. My business skills were questioned when I merged rubber plantations in a situation where I couldn’t win the bidding. However, I got most of the money and opened up space for new stuff. I ended up owning the only spice plantations in the game and in the end got a personal shipping line. Thanks to that, I was safely second with 857 rupias. The winner was the only new player, who managed to get a monopoly on Siap Saji and made a ton of money with that and some shipping lines, even though he lost the shipping company. Creating one of those Siap Saji companies was a big hit for the shippers – Halmahera was a home for a large spice plantation, which was completely removed in the Siap Saji merger.

On the final round, Tuukka shipped a lot of stuff and had the option of choosing between me and Ville. He saw that I had more money and gave all shipping to Ville. In the final scores, I was ahead of both and Tuukka lost to Ville by 33 rupias – definitely less than he gave to Ville in shipping on the last round. Had he picked me instead, he’d have been third instead of last. But I suppose you either win or lose, and it doesn’t matter that much how much you lose…

(As a side note, I think for competitive play, Indonesia scoring should be based on the ratio of your score and the winner’s score, with no value given to position. That way your incentives are to a) get as much money as you can and b) ensure the winning player gets as little as possible. This makes it unimportant who you give the shipping money at the end of the game, as long as it’s not the player who’s winning the game. That’s just not an interesting part of the game.)

In any case, Indonesia is one of the most attractive games at the moment, and easily ranks as my favourite Splotter game.

(This post originally appeared on Mastodon.)

Let’s start with the original version. It’s usable, doesn’t get in the way of playing the game, but it’s not pretty.

Since the important part of the board is a graph, I started by creating the board in Gephi (a graph editor). I was ready to ditch the geographical accuracy (the geography isn’t really a strong part of the original board) and even though about doing a board where Chicago would be right in the middle!

Laying out the graph nicely by hand would’ve been a lot of unpleasant work, so I used the automatic tools available in Gephi. A method called “Fruchterman Rheingold” created a vaguely circular shape of the graph, so that’s what I used. It needed some manual work, as some of the edges crossed each other and you can’t have that. I added some colours to the nodes and ended up with this:

This is pretty good! The east-west direction is correct here, but the north-south direction is mirrored – that’s just how the layout method organized this. While geographical accuracy wasn’t a goal, I flipped the image vertically when I moved this to Pixelmator for editing.

I was going for a minimalist look. The main usability improvement I mentioned was to colour the railroad destination cities so that it’s immediately obvious where each company is headed to. I think it’s weird the Rio Grande edition didn’t fix that, as the problem is obvious the minute you play this game with someone new. “Where Milwaukee Road is going, again?”

The cities got smaller or larger circles, with colour coding to tie the different types together. The tracks are just plain black lines with centimeter squares in them to facilitate the 8mm cubes used in the game. The original map has all the squares lined the same way; I had the cubes aligned with the line (I simply rotated the square the same amount the line was rotated).

Creating the tracks was easy, just time-consuming. Copy a line-and-square combo, move the line ends to the centers of the cities, move the square near the center of the line and rotate. Then repeat that almost hundred times!

The background has a light grey “old paper” effect, and as a finishing touch I added a transparent photo of an old locomotive there. One corner got the Chicago & NorthWestern railroad logo and one has a nice old image of a cow – the Gone West companies can be marked there. The same cow appears in the western city circles, by the way. (The destination cities have a small picture of a depot, and St. Louis and Chicago have photos of places in those cities.)

I thought about adding railroad company logos on the board to mark the spots for company cubes and money. I decided that would look ugly, and instead opted for charter cards. These are poker card sized cards with bright company logos (which would’ve looked awful on the board) and spots for cubes and money. The cards can also be flipped to show the “Gone West” status. Too bad I can’t create three-sided cards for “Special available” / “Special used” / “Gone West”.

The board also doesn’t have an action reference. I put that on cards, too. The action reference cards list all the actions and show if the dividend action is available. When a player takes the dividend action, they can flip the card to show that, and the action is no longer listed in the action reference.

Here’s my final version.

The one thing that annoys me is the destination city labels and the way they point to different directions. That was the easy solution, to avoid them overlapping with the tracks. It would look nicer if they all pointed the same way, but that would require reorganizing the tracks a bit.

This map is a lot more compact than the original. The original is almost A2 size. This fits on single A3. It’s not too cramped; it could be larger, but I like the compactness. Reading the routes is easy. The action reference cards turned out pretty good, too.

I noticed an interesting side effect. You see how the red line has built from Chicago via Dubuque and La Crosse to Minneapolis. That happened both times I’ve played with this new map. Why not – it’s the straight line to Minneapolis, the destination for red. However, this makes the green line less attractive, as Dubuque – Mason City – Sioux City would be the most direct line for green, while for red, reaching Minneapolis through Madison and Eau Claire would be the same distance, even though it looks longer. As a result, the green line didn’t start at all in either of those games.

…And now that I look at this more closely, I spotted an error in my map. There should be a connection between Cedar Rapids and Mason City that is missing. That would give green an alternate three-link route to Sioux City. Oops! Looks like I was missing a couple of other connections as well, but those weren’t as critical. The image above is updated to reflect the correct map.

We had full five players. The game was wild, with mergers shaking things up a lot. As far as rules go, Indonesia is a straightforward game, but the system is so delightfully chaotic, especially when everybody is still learning the ropes.

At one point of the game, I had a nice shipping line. Competing shipping lines were merged, and I thought I want to be the shipping master, so I bid a hefty 120% premium, paying 22 Rp‎ per ship for that line. Right after that, my original shipping line was also merged. I was out of money at that point, so I couldn’t keep it, but the buyer paid an even bigger premium for that, paying 28 Rp‎ per ship. I owned most of the ships in that merger, so I made a lot of money – and I still had a solid shipping line, just a different one than I started with.

With lots of goods production on the map and long shipping lines, the shipping companies stole the game. I won, and Hannu who got the other shipping company (and who was ready to flip the table at point as he was doing very badly) was second. The final scores were 1247–1023–634–614–441, so it’s safe to say shipping can be lucrative in Indonesia.

The game took us about three hours, excluding the rules explanations. The five-player game is fast, in rounds. I think the five-player game should be a three-hour affair once everybody knows the rules, which makes it fairly easy to play on weeknights.

We then wrapped up the evening with a quick (and a weird) game of Chicago & NorthWestern on my new map redraw (a post about that is coming up soon), which worked well.

It’s good to get back to Indonesia. It’s a top-notch game and as expected worked great in our group. Everybody loved it, and I’m sure other people in the group will also enjoy it. I originally bought the game in 2005 (directly from Splotter at Essen), but I sold it later as it didn’t fit my needs then. Now it was a good time to get back to it.

It was also a lot of fun to meet someone new. Tuukka, who writes for Lautapeliopas, lives in Tampere and occasionally plays with his game group on Wednesday nights in Taverna, joined us for this game. We’ve been talking about playing games together for a while now, and this was a great opportunity: he’s been wanting to try Splotter games. He’s also keen to try 18xx, and I’m sure we can accommodate that. Tuukka was a great match for our group, and everybody was ready to welcome him again.

While we were playing, a delivery was made at home: I now also have a brand new third edition Indonesia. It sure looks pretty, and the board has been improved a lot. I was also surprised to find my name listed in the rulebook credits. I’m not sure what I’ve done for Indonesia, but I accept the credit!

This post was originally posted on Mastodon.

It’s a funny game. This is a cube rails game where railroad companies spread out west from Chicago. Everybody gets to buy one share at the beginning of the game, then it’s the usual build track or offer stock for auction stuff from Winsome games. However! There are some really curious twists in this game.

First of all, there aren’t many dividends. Each player can trigger dividends once per game. Each company can pay a special dividend once per game, after they reach their target city (this is usually trivial). While the dividends are rare, they can be lucrative: last night my best dividend was $180.

The companies can also “go west”. When the track reaches the western edge of the board, the company can then leave the game. After that, it doesn’t build or sell shares, but it pays a bigger dividend. The game usually ends after four companies go west, but can also end when all companies have paid their special dividends or all shares are sold. These seem unlikely.

We played two games back-to-back, as the games only took 35-40 minutes each. This is an intriguing game of juggling your priorities and controlling your money. You often want to do at least three things on your turn. Build track, try to get more shares, run a special… Also how much you want to build before cashing out the special dividend, and what if a minority shareholder sends the company to west before you get the special dividend?

In the second game, the end game was delicious. The third player was out of the race no matter what. I had bigger dividends (180–150 or so), but only my opponent had a dividend card left, and of course they’re not paying out dividends. Only cash in hand matters in the end, and I had one dollar more. My opponent put a share in the auction and bid $25. I expected the company would pay a special dividend for $27 before going west and ending the game, maybe more, so I bid more and got the company. We built it up, I got $33 in dividends, and before the game was over my opponent was also forced to auction a worthless share and pay $5 for it, so I won by $14.

I used to play this once per year from 2016–2019 but haven’t played since. Now I think the game will get back to rotation, as it is a delightful. From my BGG notes, I see I’ve once won the game before any dividends were paid. That’s curious. We need to play more. I remember thinking about drawing a new board for my Winsome copy, like I did for South African Railroads. That might be a fun project at some point.

Forest Shuffle. I thought Forest Shuffle might be the first game to reach 500 plays and that might happen in 2025, but it didn’t. It’s close enough that it will happen in 2026.

A decline in live plays, growth in digital. I played more games in 2025 than in 2024 (700 vs 652), but the total time spent was lower (~350 hours vs ~380 hours). If I exclude digital games (mostly Forest Shuffle on BGA), 2025 was not as good (378 plays and ~270 hours vs 471 plays and ~330 hours). That’s not a huge surprise: my son moved out in February, and the time spent playing games with him went down a lot.

No more Magic. I decided to stop playing Magic: The Gathering on Arena. I finally decided it’s a time sink. It was something I had to do to grind the daily quests, and wasn’t always fun. Keeping up with the new stuff started to feel exhaustive. I also sold most of my paper Magic – somebody got a nice deal of ~6,000 random cards for a 50 €. I kept my draft cube and a Battle Box; those will do just fine if I ever want to play Magic.

New poker chips. I’ve had my Venerati poker chips for almost 20 years. I got a box of 100 Iron Clays for board game use at some point, and recently we’ve used a bigger Iron Clays set my friend has for 18xx use. This year, I bought a set of Ruben’s Mini Chips for 18xx games. The more compact chips are awesome.

Darts instead of go. In 2024, I had semi-regular go games before our game nights for a while. In January 2025, I thought trying darts might be fun. Now three or four of us meet every week to play darts before our board games. We’re still not particularly great, throwing doubles is a bit of a struggle for all of us.

Game of the Year 2025

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is, by far, my favourite new release in 2025. With well over 200 plays and over 60 hours, mostly at Board Game Arena, it’s my most played game. I didn’t have huge expectations for it – I thought I would give it a go to see how it’s different from the original. It turned out to be a huge hit for me. I also learnt the best strategy for the game well enough to reach the top 10 in ELO rankings on BGA.

Dartmoor is sufficiently different from the original. It seems somewhat better balanced. There’s a best strategy, yes, but it’s wider than the main strategies in original Forest Shuffle. You need to hit certain key things, but beyond that, there are many things you can do, and you have to find your way depending on the cards you get. That’s more interesting than just hoping to get the deer.

Also, Dartmoor is much more of an engine builder than the original. The original featured hardly any engine building, and even with both expansions, there aren’t many cards that can feed a strong engine. Dartmoor is all about the draw engines, and I think that’s a missed opportunity at BGA: the game doesn’t track how many extra card draws a player gets. That would be an interesting statistic, and I’m sure it would have a very strong correlation with success.

Heavy Game of the Year. 18Korea. The train game people in Helsinki have been raving about 18Korea for a while. Despite the upcoming crowdfunding for the new English edition, I went and bought the Korean edition. It was expensive, but worth it: 18Korea is a lot of fun. This 18xx game is set in Korea and for starters features the Korean War: at the middle of the game the war breaks out, everything in North Korea is lost and all the cities in South are destroyed. The players also have very strong special powers they can assign to their companies. It’s weird, highly replayable thanks to a dynamic setup, and a lot of fun. We played the game five times and saw a wide array of outcomes.

Medium Game of the Year. Innovation Ultimate. I’ve been a long-time fan of Innovation – I still have my first-edition copy, patched to third edition – but I haven’t given much thought for the expansions. The Innovation Ultimate kickstarter arrived in Spring and lead to a boom of Innovation play, and this time with the expansions. While the base game is great and easily good for 100+ plays any time, the expansions have been a lot of fun.

We’ve even played a couple of games with all the expansions at the same time. That’s feasible and crazy, but if you’re interested in trying it, I recommend doing that on Yucata, as having a computer keep track of all the rules is very helpful when you have all the expansions. Running two expansions at the time is easy.

Good new games (2024–2025)

Botanicus. This was released in Finnish by Lautapelit.fi. My friend who works as the Lautapelit.fi store manager taught me the game. I would’ve passed this otherwise, but I’m glad I didn’t – this is a fun little game. I’ve played it twice and won both times, so obviously I’m biased.

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. Co-op trick-taking meets The Lord of the Rings? Sure, why not: when Asmodee offered a review copy, I took it. I still haven’t finished the campaign and I’m not sure if I will, it was a good fun for five hours and ~60 plays. It’s not as good as The Crew and mostly easier than it, but there are some difficult chapters, too.

Galileo Galilei. I got to try this game once, and enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it was owned by the friend who has a tendency to sell games very swiftly, and I never got a chance to play this game again. It’s not SETI or even Tea Garden, but I would’ve liked to explore it further after taking the effort to learn it.

The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth. The more popular Lord of the Rings game from 2024. I can see why this is popular and I think it mostly does good things for the 7 Wonders Duel format. I enjoyed my plays and would happily play this if someone else wants to play it.

Luz. This is originally from 2013, but I played the 2024 edition. In this trick-taking game you only see the colours of your cards and show the values to other players. The people in my game group seem to hate this, but my other group enjoyed it. I’d like to play this a little more to see where I fall, but it was definitely ok, and the gimmick is funny at least once.

Restart. This is a new version of Sixteen from 2014. Lautapelit.fi is pushing their new edition a lot and has advertised it enough to make our review of it the most-read article on Lautapeliopas. This is a very casual game, with simple rules and pleasant components, and should work really well in many families. I don’t mind playing this as a filler.

Sanctuary. The light version of Ark Nova might be even better than the original! I initially tried this with my more casual group where playing Ark Nova sounds a bit much. We played Sanctuary with four and five, and both games took two hours. That’s reasonable. A three-player game with my main group took just 45 minutes. Sanctuary is probably better with fewer players, but is definitely playable with five if you don’t mind the downtime. With five fast players it’d take under 90 minutes, which isn’t bad. I think Sanctuary smooths out things well. There’s certainly a luck element on how well the tiles you get match the current game goals, but it’s still an interesting challenge.

Things in Rings. This party game of putting things in rings to form a Venn diagram is very confusing at first, but when it clicks, it’s a lot of fun.

Vantage. I’ve been more understanding for larger player counts on games where I’ve previously thought “less is more”. However, that doesn’t extend to Vantage. This game has 1–6 players in the box, and I’d never play this with more than two. I did have a good time wandering around the planet and our single play produced a nice little story with a good ending. Vantage does clever things with the game mechanisms. I wouldn’t mind playing again, but I also can tell this is a fairly inconvenient game for me.

Good older new-to-me games

1822CA and 1822: The Railways of Great Britain. We finally dived into the 1822 family. There are many games in the family, but these are the two my friend owns. We’ve played the smaller scenarios, 1822CA twice and 1822 once. I slightly prefer the British game, but that’s just a personal preference for British rails. I was afraid 1822 might have too many auctions, but it doesn’t – a lot of the time the players don’t have enough money to be active. There are certainly many clever and unusual ways to lose in these games. I’m looking forward to exploring these more, and hopefully we can play a full game of one of these at some point.

Cabanga! Small filler card game that works well with four to six players. Simple rules, good interaction.

Faraway. This little filler game has been something of a hit. Draft eight cards, then score them in reverse order. The trick of resolving the cards in reverse order is good enough. The game works well with the whole range of 2–6 players. BGG voters seem to consider this a three-player game and I can see why, but the six-player game isn’t bad, and is almost as fast as the three-player game. With two, this actually feels too fast; it’s just five minutes. I enjoyed playing this, but gave my copy to my son who liked it more than I did.

Great Western Trail: Argentina. Another variation of the cattle game. There are some good ideas here, but I still think this ranks third after the original and New Zealand. I’m happy to play any of these, but I wouldn’t want to teach these games to new players.

Haggis. I learnt that there’s a version of two-player Haggis that can be played with a standard deck of cards. We gave that a go on our cycling trip. The game was a bit confusing at first and we played some rules wrong, but I can see how this is actually a very deep two-player version of Tichu that would reward repeated play.

Herd Mentality. This was released in Finland and won the family game of the year award. That was a bit of an odd choice, but the game has won the best family game, the best adult game and the best party game awards in various countries of Scandinavia. Juries love it, that is, and why not – the idea is clever, the presentation is cute and the game is easy to enjoy.

Piles! This won the party game of the year in Finland. I like fast real-time games, and this is a solid game for that.

Wandering Towers. Kramer and Kiesling deliver another very good family game. Players race around the track, but the track changes constantly, players can get trapped and actually, you want to trap your opponents inside the wandering towers. This was delightful.

Notes on old games

18 BosWash. This magazine variant of 18 India is one of the best 18xx games at the moment. It has all the best parts of 18 India, but is streamlined at the right spots. The designers should consider releasing this as a full game.

18 India. I still like this a lot, too, even though 18 BosWash and 18Korea have been taking up most of the 18xx play time. I still think there’s a lot to learn in 18 India.

Antike II. After a five-year break, I finally got to play this. Everybody’s been saying no because I’d win for sure, and guess what happened? But in my defense, they did very little to stop me from winning.

De Vulgari Eloquentia. The more I play, the more I enjoy this old-school euro game. There are many strategies and the more we’ve played, the more the strategies unfold.

Dune: Imperium. We played ten games of Dune: Imperium or Uprising in 2024, but I only played it twice in 2025. For some reason, it hasn’t hit the table quite as often.

Fishing. This weird trick-taker is something of a staple game for us now, everybody likes it enough. It can provide some very funny results.

Forest Shuffle. This has been slightly eclipsed by Dartmoor, but I still enjoy playing the original. The Dartmoor still has a much smaller player base at Board Game Arena, so often it takes a long time to find a Dartmoor match while getting a Forest Shuffle match is a matter of seconds.

The Gang. This poker game was a bit of a flash in the pan. After the initial excitement, it hasn’t seen any play. That’s fine, and somewhat to be expected – it’s not a great match for my regular game group, and I rarely play in circumstances where The Gang would shine.

Go. I didn’t play any face to face go in 2025, and I also started to wind down my online play at Online-Go.com. I would like to play more face to face go, but I didn’t have the energy to find new opponents that would match my skill level.

Mahjong. I played one game of riichi with my friends, and didn’t visit the Tuesday night mahjong club once. I prioritized other things. Playing more mahjong would be nice, but the mahjong club wasn’t much fun in the end – some of the players there aren’t as welcoming as they could be.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI got many plays for something this heavy. Taverna got a copy of the Space Agencies expansion from Essen, and I’ve played the game twice with the expansion. It’s a good expansion, I like skipping the first round, the agencies are fine and the new aliens are interesting. I’m sure we’ll keep enjoying SETI in 2026.

Tichu. 2025 was a slow year for Tichu, I only played it a few times. It was played more than that in my game group, but I was often playing the other game, SETI or 18xx, which of course isn’t a bad thing. But I’m hoping to play more Tichu in 2026. I went and bought the Tichu app on my phone. I’ve played a lot of Hearts and Spades, and could use some better games.

Troyes. I got to play Troyes again! It’s a lovely game.

Underwater Cities. This is also a great game. We played this once with four players, which was surprisingly smooth. The new Data Era expansion is good, a solid “more of the same” expansion.

The not-so-good, the disappointing and the plain bad

Crime Scene: Moscow 1989. This is a series of escape room mystery games, with extra effort on the storyline written by a professional crime author. The puzzles weren’t bad; some I had to brute force as I couldn’t figure them out. This didn’t impress me, and I’m not interested in exploring other games in the series.

The Number. This was a random pick from the Taverna game library. It’s by Hisashi Hayashi, so it should be interesting, right? Well, it turned out I didn’t enjoy this guessing game at all, it was an annoying exercise of mind-reading.

Tichu: Booster. Special power cards for Tichu. Every time someone calls Tichu, players get new booster cards, which provide one-time effects. What could go wrong? The main problem here is that I’d rather play regular Tichu.

Fives and dimes

1. Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor (233)
2. Forest Shuffle (100)
3. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game (62)
4. Innovation (27)
5. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (14)
6. Piles! (10)
7. Cribbage (9)
8. Slovenian Tarock (8)
   Black Forest (8)
9. Fishing (7)
   Faraway (7)
10. Herd Mentality (6)
11. Tichu (5)
    Splendor (5)
    Cabanga! (5)
    18Korea (5)

Year metric

1. Battle Line (23/25)
2. Innovation (16/16)
3. Oregon (15/15)
4. San Juan (17/22) *
5. Attika (17/23) *
6. Carcassonne (17/25)
7. Slovenian Tarock (15/19)
8. Samarkand: Routes to Riches (14/16) *
9. Ta Yü (16/23) *
10. Age of Steam (16/23) *

Games marked with an * didn’t get played this year.

Staying power

1. Forest Shuffle (6.443)
2. Innovation (5.086)
3. Mahjong (4.535)
4. Slovenian Tarock (4.257)
5. Ora et Labora (2.509)
6. A Feast for Odin (2.493)
7. Great Western Trail (2.3)
8. Tichu (2.014)
9. Fields of Arle (1.856)
10. Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor (1.763)

This is a metric devised by Eric Brosius, and the scores for the games are calculated this way:

For each game and each year, calculate SQRT(number of plays in a year) * (5/6^(current year – year)). Sum these, divide with the sum of year weights, raise to the second power and multiply by the game length in hours.

H-index

My H-index for this year is 8 (9 last year). My total H-index is 53, up one from last year.

I didn’t play any of the games on the edge, but had two new games shoot up from zero to over 53, pushing the H-index. Repeating that is unlikely, as the next step would require five new games above the threshold.

The shortest route to 54 is just six plays, but the games are slightly unlikely (St. Petersburg, Ingenious, Super Rhino, Santorini, and Da Vinci Code or Animal Upon Animal twice). On the other hand, a typical amount of Tichu will lift it close to the threshold in 2026.

• Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor score calculator
• 18 BosWash score calculator

I’ve been playing a lot of Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor recently. On BGA, mostly, at the rate of ~40 plays per month. It’s probably needless to say I like it. I think it’s a significant improvement over base Forest Shuffle, and good variety when compared to the expanded game.

There’s a strategy that’s clearly the best (if you want spoilers, see here), but it’s more interesting to execute than hoping to draw deer and wolves in the base Forest Shuffle. It’s strong, though: when I play against people who don’t use that strategy, I win most of the time (there’s one other strategy that can compete if it does really well). When playing against someone using the same strategy, the games can be interesting or come down to one of the players getting the engine running faster. But for a 15-minute game, it’s all good.

As nobody had done a scoring app for Dartmoor, I created one based on the excellent Forest Shuffle app. Mine is slightly less complex and only does single-player scoring; on the other hand, it’s a one page of HTML and one JS file, and very easy to edit in the future.

We play 18xx games using the 18xx.games site as a moderator. However, 18 BosWash, the streamlined 18 India variant from the Traxx magazine isn’t available there, so we have to use poker chips when playing that. It’s not bad, but the end-game scoring is. As in 18 India, the value of 18 BosWash company shares at the end of the game depends on the stock market value of the share and the total value of the assets the company owns (cash, rolling stock, shares owned), and calculating all that by hand is a pain.

It’s easier with a spreadsheet and that’s what we did with 18 India before 18xx.games supported it. However, carrying the game, poker chips and a laptop is annoying. So, I created a simple HTML and JS app that makes it easy to calculate the values of the companies and the final scores of players based on their stock holdings. That should make the end game calculations faster and less prone to errors.

18 BosWash is an awesome game, by the way, one of the best 18xx games there is. It uses the best stuff from 18 India, while streamlining away some extra weight. Both have their place in my collection, but at the moment I probably have a slight preference to 18 BosWash.

Of course, the most interesting 18xx title in my collection is still 18Korea.

I’ve been playing enough 18xx games with poker chips recently that I decided to go and buy a set of Ruben’s Mini-Chips. Having a smaller, more easily portable set of quality poker chips started to feel attractive.

I went for 300 chips, with the following distribution: 70 × 1, 70 × 5, 80 × 20, 50 × 100, 20 × 500 and 1 × 2k. I went with the Hex design: I wanted denominations and this style appealed to me the most (Chains was too minimalist, Rails too decorative).

Hopefully the set works out. Last time we played with my Venerati set, we had a bit of a shortage of 1s, and that set only has 50. The Mini-Chip set weighs 1.2 kilos less than the Venerati set. The size of the Mini-Chip boxes is 1.5 dm³ while Veneratis are 2.2 dm³, so there’s also a big difference.

Innovation Ultimate. I’ve been a fan of Innovation for 15 years now. I’ve only played the base game, though: my interest in the expansions has been close to zero (I tried Echoes once in beta). When the Innovation Ultimate crowdfunding was announced, I was intrigued and soon found myself ordering seven copies (four for members of my game group, three for other people).

When the game finally arrived in March, it was time to delve into the expansions. I’ve been very happy to play lots of Innovation, more than 20 plays now, and we’ve been trying various expansions alone and combinations, too. We’ve even played a couple of games with all the expansions!

Let’s start with that: Innovation with all the expansions is crazy. We tried it once with the physical game and found it to be somewhat exhausting. It’s hard work to try and follow all the rules. We’ve since played it twice on Yucata, where it’s more convenient.

Games with one or two expansion are easier to manage. My favourite expansions are the ones that shake things a lot. I like Artifacts and Figures. I haven’t found a combination I don’t like.

The new card design looks good, and I like the changes they made in the base game. The age 11 is a hoot, and the junking mechanism that removes cards permanently from the game is nice: I like how it makes more likely for the game to get to the high ages, where the most fun is. There may be some added chaos, at least initially, but that’s what draws me to Innovation, so I’m fine with that.

Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-taking Game. Counting plays, this is my most-played game of 2025. We’ve played this three times, but since each deal is a play, it’s a total of 41 plays so far. Initially, this seemed like a fairly easy variant of The Crew. Later scenarios increased the difficulty level a bit, but this still seems a bit softer. I’ve now played twelve of the eighteen scenarios. If you like co-op trick-taking, this is worth a go.

Black Forest. The new version of Glass Road ditches the simultaneous action-selection and double-guessing element of the cards. That’s bound to be divisive, as that was something that separated Glass Road from other Rosenberg games. I was never a fan of double-guessing so I’m happy with the new action selection mechanism that is based on worker placement with just one worker.

Tom from Shut Up & Sit Down likes this game because it’s a bit fuzzy. You don’t necessarily optimize every move, but instead play from gut instinct. That’s how I feel about Black Forest, too. It’s a nice little adventure where you move between the villages, collect stuff and try to build something neat. There’s room for games like this, and I’m happy I bought Black Forest even if it felt a bit stupid now that Nooa has moved to a different city and we get to play less often.

Faraway. If you need a nice filler game that scales from two to six players without problems, here’s one for you. Players draft and play eight cards, then resolve them in backwards order. Many cards require a certain amount of symbols and only the symbols in that card and the ones played after it count. There are conflicting interests: you want to play cards in ascending order to collect bonus cards, but often it’d be better to play them in descending order.

I thought this was fine. The two-player game plays fast; maybe too fast? It’s over in just minutes. The six-player game took about 20 minutes, which is very nice for something like this. This is an enjoyable game, but I think I’ll pass my review copy to someone who likes it more – like my son.

Forest Shuffle. I still played a ton of Forest Shuffle on BGA. I’ve played the game over 200 times this year. If I keep on playing it like this, it will be the first game in my records to hit 500 plays, and that will happen in 2025.

More activity. This was a more active year than 2023. My number of plays was much higher than in 2021–2023. If I exclude Forest Shuffle, I’m still ahead of 2023. About 380 hours of time spent on games is good, and only about 50 hours of that is Forest Shuffle. The final numbers are: 652 sessions, 156 different games, 41 new games.

BG Stats. This year, I started using the BG Stats app. I like it, and I wish I had started using it before. It’s addictive to see the scores and all the data. Tracking game lengths has also been very interesting and worth the effort of timing games.

A new game group. I started a second game group this year. It was supposed to be an open game group for bookstagram people, but it sooned fixed into a closed group of five people. I’ve loved the fresh group dynamic. These are people who like games and play games, but aren’t hardcore gamers. I’m the sommelier for the group: we meet monthly and I always teach them new games, which they can then introduce to their other game groups. I’ve enjoyed these chances to play more casual games and it’s fun to see fresh views on older games.

Game of the Year 2024

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is the new game highlight for me in 2024. It’s a game I enjoy a lot and can’t stop thinking about. One of the Tomáš Holek’s three debut titles in Spiel 24, the game made a big splash and despite my initial doubts, I went ahead and bought it.

SETI hits a sweet spot for me: it’s a complex game, yet is easy to teach and flows well. I was worried about the reported four-hour play times, but in our fast group, SETI is a quick game. The individual turns are fast and the game move alongs at good pace, occasionally interrupted by a longer combo turn.

The array of possible strategies seems rich. You have so many options! The early game is hard for new players, it’s so open, but once you start to figure out how the various subsystems in the game function, you’ll start noticing paths you can take to generate resources and allow you achieve so much more.

The game also looks great. The box cover is very beautiful and all the components are both functional and pretty.

Heavy Game of the Year. 18 India. The game that kickstarted the 18xx boom. This unusual variant resides in the 1829 Mainline branch of the family tree, where all tiles are available from the beginning of the game, players hold shares in hand and trains never rust and can be sold back to the bank. 18 India throws in a lot of variety and all sorts of special rules, making it a very interesting game. If I had to cull my 18xx collection to one title, right now it would be 18 India.

Light Game of the Year. The Gang. The co-op poker charmed me. A simple idea, but it works so well. No poker expertise is required. I introduced this to my casual group, and they loved it so much we didn’t play anything else that night. If you’re looking for something easy to crack the ice, The Gang is worth a look.

Good new games (2023–2024)

18 BosWash. This is a magazine variant for 18 India. It has a different board, depicting the Boston-Washington corridor. 18 BosWash streamlines the 18 India rules a lot. It plays fast, but has a lot of space for clever moves. Another big hit from the team.

Fishing. Friedemann Friese’s clever trick-taking game has a lovely ebb and flow: win tricks and you’ll score points, lose tricks and you’ll get access to better cards. It’s a bit long, but the rounds are required for it to work, and I think it’s well worth the effort if you’re looking for a trick-taking game on the sillier end of the spectrum.

Harmonies. Something I’d like to explore more. Seems like a fun game like Cascadia, not a frustrating game like Calico.

Medical Mysteries: NYC Emergency Room. A nice twist on escape room games. Figuring out what’s wrong with the patients is fun. Getting all the details correct is pleasantly difficult.

MLEM: Space Agency. A variation of Heckmeck, but with cats in space. Good value for money. A nice little push-your-luck adventure.

Oranienburger Kanal. I initially skipped this Uwe Rosenberg title: I’ve had bad experiences with Spielworxx games. After reading praise for the game as Rosenberg’s Magnum Opus, I caved and bought a very expensive used copy instead of waiting for the new Sylex edition I knew was coming. I’m glad I did: Oranienburger Kanal is a very good game, and the Sylex edition was a big disappointment. This isn’t Rosenberg’s best game – I still think Fields of Arle is the better two-player game, for example – but ranks very high.

Tea Garden. Another Holek title. I ended up buying this, as my friend was very eager to ditch this after just one play. This is nice. Not as good as SETI, but I like the cleverness.

The White Castle. A very tight game. I didn’t like this a lot at first, but it grew on me, and I’d like to investigate this more.

World Wonders. A rather lovely polyomino tile-laying game. Works well with five players.

Good older games I hadn’t played before

18GB: The Railways of Great Britain. The 18xx fever got me looking at new titles. 18GB seemed promising: it’s by Dave Berry, whose 1825 variants I appreciated, and it combines ideas from 1825 and 1860. The track-laying is delightfully tricky.

First Rat. An impulse purchase, this Kennerspiel-level game turned out to be a good purchase. I’ve played this with many groups, and it has always worked. It’s fun with any number of players and requires a nice amount of strategical thinking while still being easy to teach and play.

Gimme That! The best stupid game of the year. Get five or six players and this is more fun that it has any right to be.

Hamlet: The Village Building Game. My first play was a sour experience because I played so poorly. The second time I played better, and the game was much better.

Lucky Numbers. I like Completto a lot. This is a similar game that plays fast with super simple rules. I think I prefer Completto because the wooden tiles are a better tactile experience, but this one’s nice too.

Schadenfreude. Dan Thurot and Cole Wehrle discussed this in a podcast episode, I was intrigued and built a home-made copy just before Ropecon. It was worth the effort; this is a funny trick-taking game with a name that’s on point.

Sichuan Bloody Rules Mahjong. A new way to play mahjong. This is currently the most popular variant in China, I’ve been told, and why not: it’s fast and simple. I’ve mostly played this on Mahjong Soul, but I’ve tried this once with actual tiles. Unfortunately, opportunities to play casual mahjong are few and far between. I’d love to explore this game more.

Smart10. The best trivia game at the moment. Everybody gets to have a go, there’s some push-your-luck element involved – how confident are you?

The Castles of Burgundy. An old classic I had only tried once online. Now we gave it a go with the actual game, and it turned out to be better than expected. I’d definitely play more.

Trekking Through History. For a quick and simple family game, this one’s pretty good. Nice production values.

Troyes. Another old classic I hadn’t played. My first go left me a good impression. I’d love to play more.

12 Chip Trick. This simple trick-taking game played with poker chips charmed some people in our group, while leaving others completely cold. I’m in the charmed group, I think this is lovely.

Children’s games

For the first time, this list is empty. I didn’t play anything with my kids five times. Times they are indeed a-changing.

Notes on old games

1829 Mainline. I bought this originally to support Francis Tresham years ago, and finally played it properly. It took us a couple of plays in 2024 to get the rules straight. This is a better game than I expected, but 18 India has developed this branch further.

Dune: Imperium and Dune: Imperium – Uprising. I like both a lot, and I still don’t have much of a preference. I’ll happily play both. The 3 vs 3 team game in Uprising is nice. I bought the original with both expansions when my friend decided he only needs to own Uprising.

Go. With almost 40 live plays, this was a very active year. I also played a lot – over 400 games – at OGS. My rating graph went up and down between 10k and 14k. I’m not a single-digit kyu player yet. Maybe one day!

Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper. This old classic made a bit of a comeback. I even played some three-player games. It’s over 25 years old now, but still worth playing.

Ricochet Robot. I was helping friend set up his bicycle smart trainer (my own Wahoo Kickr was one of the best purchases I made in 2024), and we played games afterwards. He had Ricochet Robot, so of course I wanted to play this old favourite. It was my first play in 21 years! That was a delight.

The not-so-good, the disappointing and the plain bad

CuBirds. This didn’t make much sense.

Daybreak. I like the main card mechanism, but I found the theme and the difficulty level simply depressive.

1882: Assiniboia. This was a welcome reminder of why I don’t like the 1830 branch of 18xx games a lot.

18Ireland. This cruel 18xx game is interesting in theory, but wasn’t a lot of fun to actually play.

Taj Mahal. This Knizia classic made a comeback. A friend bought it and we’ve played it twice now. I’ve been fighting for the fourth place in both games. It’s a clever design, but I don’t enjoy playing it.

Fives and dimes

1. Forest Shuffle (213)
2. Go (39)
3. The Gang (17)
4. Tichu (11)
   Schadenfreude (11)
5. Mahjong (10)
   Lucky Numbers (10)
6. Shogi (9)
   Oranienburger Kanal (9)
   18 India (9)
   First Rat (9)
7. L.L.A.M.A. (8)
   SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (8)
8. Slovenian Tarock (6)
   Dune: Imperium (6)
   The White Castle (6)
   Xiangqi (6)
   Smart10 (6)
9. Space Base (5)
   Harmonies (5)

Year metric

1. Battle Line (22/24)
2. San Juan (17/21) *
3. Tarock (16/18)
4. Innovation (15/15)
5. Attika (17/22) *
6. Oregon (14/14)
7. Samarkand: Routes to Riches (14/15) *
8. Ta Yü (16/22) *
   Age of Steam (16/22)
9. Carcassonne (16/24) *
10. Love Letter (12/13)
11. Mahjong (15/23)
12. Einfach Genial (14/21)
13. Fields of Arle (10/10)
    Merkator (10/10)

Games marked with an * didn’t get played this year.

Staying Power

1. Mahjong (5.35)
2. Forest Shuffle (4.16)
3. Tarock (4.07)
4. A Feast for Odin (3.61)
5. Fields of Arle (2.68)
6. Innovation (2.58)
7. Great Western Trail (2.48)
8. Ora et Labora (2.41)
9. Nusfjord (1.99)
10. Altiplano (1.85)

This is a metric devised by Eric Brosius, and the scores for the games are calculated this way:

For each game and each year, calculate SQRT(number of plays in a year) * (5/6^(current year – year)). Sum these, divide with the sum of year weights, raise to the second power and multiply by the game length in hours.

H-index

My H-index for this year is 9 (8 last year). My total H-index is 52, up two from last year. I expected it would be stuck at 50 for a long time, but then realized it wasn’t too hard to nudge it up a bit.