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My local board game supplier had something nice to show me a few weeks ago: a treasure hunting game that looked suspiciously like Catan from afar. It turned out to be something else; Tobago is a game in which you use deductive reasoning to find treasures and split them amongst those who helped find them.
Tetris and handhelds go hand in hand. After all, it was the original portable brick – the Game Boy – that made it a common household name. So it was quite sobering to discover that the PSP didn’t have a version of Tetris to call its own. Initially I thought it was a weird typo I must’ve misread, but no, until last week there was no Tetris for PSP. Luckily, it has a version now. And boy, does it rock!
Over the years I’ve grown fond of boardgames that give the player control over his or her actions in some way. Games like the Game of the Goose and the Game of Life turned into extended dice-rolls with a lot of fluff for me. Games like Magic: The Gathering and Catan took over quite quickly as a result.
Still, there’s something to be said for pure chance-based games. There’s always that idea that you can somehow influence luck. Keltis: Der Weg der Steine (a smaller portable variant of the similar named board game) works like this. Keltis is inherently a chance based game and deviously fast to play, yet it feels as if you are in control. Pick a stone from a closed pile and decide whether or not to use it to produce columns of numbers counting down or up. If you don’t use it, it’s discarded into a commonly accessible pile.
