My random travels in the past year or so brought me to literally a few points away from the next level of airline status meaning I “had to” to fly once before early March. While searching for cheap flights that would help me take that one step over to the “gold card”, I thought “what if I asked the guys in Oulu, northern Finland, if I could pop in with the game and we would check out our projects”? One of the guys has been posting about his personal developments in FB, so why not do a day trip there?
The response was very positive and last weekend after a short flight I found myself at the Oulu airport, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. As I know, he is very active in our small fb-group, and also has multiple game designs under development. What a perfect opportunity to check our projects out!
While waiting for the other guys to show up, we went through his three game projects:
Finlandization 1946-1991
A game of the turbulent years of political balancing between east and west, commonly known as Finlandization. You can look it up in Google 🙂
I found an instant like in this game, if it becomes a product, highly recommended! This is not the type of game that I typically go for, but I have to say, it sounded really interesting. Btw, I saw a newer version of the board than this – but of course failed to take a picture.
What really hit home were the familiar characters for my generation, especially the Finnish “elite” – well-known figures from my childhood. They play a part in the game and in addition to these people, you’ll have the CIA and KGB wrestling over the influence of our politicians and the president. It was funny how many presidents the superpowers had versus us over the many decades covered by the game.
Sissit! (guerillas, special forces – although they weren’t really that, sort of SAS/LRDG, rangers, whatever)
Another title of our turbulent past. When I was young, I used to read these books about the “sissit” – they were plentiful in my dad’s bookshelf. There are probably hundreds of books on the subject (mostly in Finnish), but it’s one of many small things that helped us to remain free from you-know-who.
The game is played on a small map with various scenarios where the Finnish guerilla unit has a task to complete and the Russians will obviously try to prevent that from happening. You can be airlifted in or out, get resupplied, use pervitin as a last measure – but then the game will end shortly.
I am looking forward to these games, good, sound mechanisms and a topic not really ever covered by a boardgame, or probably any game anywhere.
Cilicia
This is a game about the end of the Armenian Cilicia in the 14th century after the Mamluk invasion. Of course, in the game, you can try to alter history and save Cilicia from occupation! A bit of an odd topic comparing to the other two, but I must say, I LOVE TO LEARN about history!
It uses a card-driven system with point to point movement and the map is drawn by an Armenian. A very simple, yet powerful system – let’s see if this will hit the shelves at some point!
1758 Fort Carillon
Well, for some reason, this interests me quite a bit 🙂 We spent a good deal of time checking out what Carillon is all about and took a good test run until I ran out of time and had to head back to the airport for my return flight.
We got the British invasion going and they really pushed hard for a historical result around the ford at Bernetz Brook but still didn’t manage to get Howe killed!
As a designer, it was really cool to see what the pain points were – I have taken lots of notes. And of course, the name of the game was to learn and push the system a bit to see how things flow, or don’t flow. I have noticed several commonalities amongst the testers (maybe the term tester is “pushing it” a bit, but for the lack of a better one I will just use it for now). For instance, simple things like differentiating between a leader and a combat unit. I am making some counter updates based on these observations and I really hope they will iron out some of the problems surfaced so far.
There is a lot of French artillery in the fort but here we didn’t set them up properly – each of the four bastions can have only so many cannons and they can fire only to specific directions.
If you read all the way through the post, why not leave a brief comment? Even just a “Hi” is better than a random IP address in the statistics 🙂 It would be really nice to know if people actually find this stuff interesting.