Your blog looks very nice! You will not regret WordPress. You are straight into my blogroll…

Nice review. 2004 has been a pretty good year for games. I’ll have to think about doing my own review but the games that really stood out for me were Ticket To Ride, San Juan, Memoir ‘44 and Coda/ DaVinci Code (the last for being such an accessible deduction game that anyone can get into). I’m still hopeful that Reef Encounter and Struggle of Empires will shine but I still haven’t been able to play either so far.

BGG is still great although it has been difficult to filter out the good stuff from the dross this year. Spielfrieks is still ok but is not a patch on what it was a while ago. Rec.games.board is now only good for the very occasional item.

Well, after dithering for ages, I have now started experimenting with WordPress following your recommendation. You can see my initial attempts at http://www.spiel.co.uk and any suggestions would be very welcome. I’ll need to start publicising it a bit soon as well so watch out for the odd post on Spielfrieks and rec/uk.games.board.

Garry

I don’t have/don’t want a blog so I’ll cheekily use yours to give my view of 2004:

2004 was an excellent year for new games – for me the best in the last 4 or 5 years. A number of serious games are likely to stay on the gaming table for some time to come: Struggle of Empires, Goa, Maharaja, Power Grid and St. Petersburg, with honourable mentions to Tahuantinsuyu and the Sceptre of Zavendor. Plus we got 4 new Warfrog maps for Age of Steam. Essen threw up generally mediocre games presumably because most of the good stuff had already been released. I did come back with a few real heavyweights that haven’t seen much light yet though. Antiquity and 7 Ages both need more plays before a final decision but either or both may turn out to be among my top three of all time and Revolution remains untouched – it looks a bit dry and possibly outdated but I just couldn’t resist a new Francis Tresham game. Here’s my ‘awards’ for 2004.

Worst game: YES (not to be confused with YS) – I managed to win this before any of my opponents even had a turn. How a company like Ravensburger can put out such a fundamentally flawed game is amazing.

Most over-hyped game: Oltramere – an Ok game but nothing special. I think it only got such a good buzz around Essen because there wasn’t too much else at that sort of level competing against it.

Most disappointing game: War of the Ring, by a long way. Poor production, a desire to stick to the books at the expense of gameplay, and a game that is way too long for what it is left me very cold with this which is a shame as I really wanted to like it and I think the Hunt/Fellowship mechanism is excellent. There is a chance I may be persuaded otherwise but there’s too much other stuff that I know I like competing for limited table time that it probably won’t get that chance.

Best ‘older’ game: Age of Steam: Nearly all my games have been PBEM this year but this has introduced me to new players and hence new styles of play. I still think this has got everything and there’s so much replayability in the base game but the diversity of the additional maps just means that I can’t see myself ever getting bored with it.

Best new game, Runner-Up: Ticket to Ride. Probably overtaken Settlers as the game I will use to introduce non-gamers. Beautifully produced, scales well for 2-5 players and the element of luck around the ticket draw is actually just right for this length and weight of game.

Best new game: San Juan. I’ve played this over 50 times in 9 months when no other game has reached double figures. A card game like this is bound to have a luck of the draw element but there are clear ways to alleviate this and the fact that there are several ways to win means you can adapt your strategy to suit the cards you draw. I keep saying such and such a card is too strong and then change my mind after a few more games. I think this is a good sign of a very good game which is, in my opinion (and this is possibly more sacrilegious than me saying War of the Ring is not the best game ever), more fun – and therefore better – than Puerto Rico.