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 It’s the end of March and now the dust has settled enough to look back at my game-discoveries from 2022, and do a write up of my favourites…   Read more .

Back in 2020 I decided to do a top 25 games as a countdown to Jul over on Instagram . That was a fun experiment. This year I’ve decided to revisit it in a more… scientific manner. Part I: 25-50 Part II: 16-24 Part III: 7-15 Part IV: 4-6 Part V: 2-3 Part VI: 1

Some weeks ago, to end an evening of board gaming, I was introduced to the Knizia roll and write called Criss Cross (or Détrak here in France). A fascinating two dimensional dice placement game with very simple rules. As we left my friends place we discussed that it should be feasible to implement a simple AI for the game. So, when I got home, I started the process… Part 1 Part 2

This post has moved to my new blog:  https://blog.ervik.fr/2022-04-05-the-9-greatest-boardgames-discovered-in/

Fjordar is an epic, tactical strategy game for 1 to 4 players, set during the Norwegian Civil War. The game begins in the year 1130, when the old king Sigurd Jorsalfar dies. Each player begins the game as one of Sigurd's heirs or one of the other influential people in Norway at the time, who is vying for power in the vacuum left by the old king's death. – Fjordar, BGG A while back, after a lengthy exchange on ideas around this topic, the designer of Fjordar, Frode Brændø, asked me if I would be interested in helping out with designing a solitaire variant for this upcoming game. Of course I would! Here are some brief notes on some from the design process. Idea We wanted to make an artificial opponent based the following criteria: Non-fiddlyness Running the opponent should not lead to a lot of overhead for the player. Readability The player should to some extent be able to read the artificial player enough to predict future actions and react to them. Keep ga...

2020 was an… interesting… year boardgamewise, and in this post I'll summarize some of my key findings, but first, some stats: I played 42 … things… for the first time according to BG Stats . 8 of them were expansions, so 34 new games, then. (Down from 97/88 last year.) Interestingly, 8 of my top 10 most played games of 2019 was new-to-me games, whereas in 2020 it was the opposite – only 2 of them were new-to-me.  Every year, since I started logging my board game plays semi-consistently back in 2013, more than half of all games played has been new-to-me. In 2020 it fell below one third. I seem to have been more keen to show my kids the classics than seeking out new games in these confined times… (Or, maybe even more importantly, I have hardly been to local board game cafés to test new games, I have hardly rented new games from our friendly board game rental store, I have hardly played games at friend’s ...

We can't stop playing games together even if we are confined, now, can we? But, what are our options? (Apart from spawning players within your confinement, but that tends to take 7-10 years...) This is a living post -- constantly updated. (Last update 2020-04-06.) Table of content Video conference compatible boardgames Tech Random-Writes Eurogames Party games Forever alone Solitaire games Games with official solitaire variants Games with unofficial solitaire variants Games I have played as solitaires Virtual board games Online tools Dedicated apps Unofficial web apps Play by (e)mail Video games Video games without (too much) screen Discussion Video conference compatible boardgames One of the reasons boardgames are so appealing is that it gets us away from our screens. Using video conference technologies might be the best way to play games with remote players, with the least screen nuisance. The basic idea is that one player runs the game...

2019 was a good year boardgamewise. I played 97… things… for the first time according to BG Stats (some of them are not (even) on BoardGameGeek(!)). 9 of them are expansions, so 88 new games, then. It was difficult to cull this list down to a top 9, but here goes. (As usual this is not really my favourite nine games, but rather a kind of optimal games library of games I played in 2019. Horses for courses.) Filler games 9 of the 88 above-mentioned games were “roll and writes”/”flip and writes”/”random writes”, or what you might want to call them. Both of the games I ended up with as favourite filler games are. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Of Cardboard Sheep (@do_meeples_dream) on Feb 1, 2020 at 8:02am PST First one out is the great little Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale . This has you discovering lands for a particularly picky queen, or something. The theme is as good a fit as it gets ...