This is my favourite type of con: a fairly small number of people but enough to play a variety of games, piles of games on table to look at and play, and nobody needs to do any administration during the day.

I played a mixture of new games and old favourites. Let’s start with the new:

Flip 7 is a simple push-your-luck card game, easy enough for just about anybody who can count the scores. This was a fun opener for seven people, which made it feel more like an event. I don’t see much need for this otherwise.

Rayroads is a very nihilistic space train game from Amabel Holland. The game always ends badly: either you exhaust the resources of your home planet, the local star collapses or a capitalist fascist eugenics doomsday cult takes over. We ended up exhausting the resources, which I felt very concretely: in the end, I needed the cheapest, most common resource, and couldn’t get any.

I’m not sure how much fun Rayroads is, but it’s an interesting experience. Fortunately, it didn’t take the two hours the box claims; I’m not sure it would be fun for two hours. I’m looking forward to further experiments with the system to see how fun a game it is. There is something delightfully weird about it, that’s for sure.

Feed the Kraken is a well-liked social deduction game. This isn’t really my genre, but with ten players, this seemed like a fun event. It was, but it would’ve been more fun if I had been able to actually do something in the game. Now I didn’t do much more than the guy who just watched us play. The experience was entertaining, though. I was a good sailor (always the most boring thing in social deduction games) and in the end could’ve decided the game as our win, but the captain didn’t choose me as the final navigator (after the two previous navigator candidates had jumped to the sea instead of making bad decisions), so the pirates won.

Challengers! Beach Cup doesn’t have a lot more agency in it, but felt much better. We had eight players for a proper tournament. My deck started a bit slow, I then got some wins, but it wasn’t enough: I had 27 fans and 29 was enough to reach the final. Experience won: the only player who had played the game before won the final. It was a close call, though. It’d be fun to see how this plays with just four players, and as an eight-player (or even more!) con game this is great.

Fresh Fish is something I’ve enjoyed, but haven’t played in ages – since 2012, to be exact. I’m not sure what I think of it. It’s fun, but it also feels a bit clunky. I suppose more experience with the game would make it flow better. I don’t feel terrible about selling my copy, but wouldn’t mind playing this more.

1846: The Race for Midwest is notable for being the game I’ve played the most without winning it. I’m now at 12 plays and zero wins. I need to print an A4 with huge text “DO NOT PAR FIRST COMPANY TOO HIGH” because otherwise I forget that, par the first company too high and lose the game. Guess what happened this time? But it was still a good game; with 18xx.games, we sped through the game in about 90 minutes.

Crokinole was requested and got played a lot. Coconuts wasn’t requested, but turned out to be a bit of a surprise hit.

I was tempted by another Amabel Holland title, Rayroads, and while buying that, noticed there’s For-Ex II: She Made Another One. It’s from 2024, but I had missed it completely. A friend of mine wanted a copy, so I added that to my order, and yesterday, we gave it a go.

It’s still very weird.

Everything’s streamlined a bit, though, and the new dry-erase components are a major improvement. Handling things is now much easier than it used to be. Understanding what to do is another thing; I’ve rarely seen so much head-scratching from a group of four experienced players.

I know I didn’t play well, as proven by my last place. I had a pile of Chinese yuan and managed to convert those to other currencies before the end of the game with a reasonable rate (trading 5 yuan to 5 euros, when the correct rate would’be been 12.5 yuan to 5 euros). That did unfortunately little good for me. I was a bit too broke in other currencies throughout the game.

There are clever things in this game. I quite liked the way you have five action tokens you can use to do the different actions in the game: four regular actions and one wild card. The spent tokens go to a queue, and whenever you do a Resolve action, you fill your tokens to five from the back end of the queue. Also if you end spend your last token, you get five from the queue. Those five can be anything, so you may end up severely limited in what you can do.

I’m looking forward to future plays. I’m pretty sure this is more of an interesting experience than a solid game, but right now it’s an experience I want to explore.

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.