I'm back to school, and back to blogging. Hopefully grades will get a little better this year...
In the holiday I've been playing "Tyskerspill" (German's games) with my wife and my siblings. You know, those really well designed strategy board games like Settlers of Catan. We played that, and a game called Puerto Rico. I really can't praise the design of that game enough. It's complex and fascinating, but you still don't have to study the modest rulebook very much beforehand.
The rulebook was obviously translated from german, though. Even when perfectly correct, german people's english has a certain odd quality, even to (norwegian) me. Not that it mattered that much for Puerto Rico, though. We could probably have played the german version itself with little trouble.
Settlers of Catan, though, was another matter. It was the norwegian translation, but it was obviously translated from danish, and with very little skill. I can't say for sure if the translator was norwegian or danish, but he apparently didn't know that the innocious word "må" means two quite different things: "must" in norwegian, "may" in danish (Shame on you, Dan-spil!). We had some trouble figuring out which actions were mandatory and which were optional, and we probably ended up doing it wrong in some ways, but it didn't seem to affect gameplay much. It was a very balanced game.
So consider me hooked on tyskerspill. My brother and sisters are back where they live, of course, but I'm pretty certain my friend Rune will like Puerto Rico.
Yet another cool thing that I first read about in the saturday edition of Dagens Næringsliv, after geocaching and all that. Slashdot could take a cue from DN's feature journalists!
Hmm, the game-addicted family DN wrote about played Carcassonne, and that seems really cool. It's from the same people who published Puerto Rico, too. They may have good taste :-) I'll look into it if I get the chance.
Unfortunately I forgot to give the paranoid koala a call when he was home. I'm sorry!