Boardgamey goodness

[adamsmithjr]

So, I just got hold of the Agricola expansion, "Farmers of the Moor". It's jolly good. Mrs AdamSmithJr and I tended to prefer the family version of Agricola, which has far fewer random elements than the standard, more complex game. "Farmers of the Moor" adds complexity and strategic depth without adding any more randomness. It's really good - gives

Comments

[bateleur]

Useful tip, thanks!

[adamsmithjr]

If you want to get seriously geeky, I am happy to discuss the details further over the phone...

[bateleur]

I always want to get seriously geeky, of course, but I should perhaps mention that I haven't played Agricola itself so the subtleties of what the expansion achieves would likely be lost on me.

[adamsmithjr]

Well, let me keep my advice simple: it is perhaps the greatest modern boardgame, bar none. Plays well from 2-5 players. It is on the complex side - more complex than Settlers or Carcassonne, certainly - but not absurdly so. You may wish to pen a note to Santa.

[anonymous]

Do you recognise any of yourself in this article from the Wall Street Journal about economists' personal habits?

-- a regular reader, logged-off, at work

[adamsmithjr]

Not me, gov!

[jiggery_pokery]

This post seems like the appropriate place to bring this up, somehow.

Many thumbs up for your recent piece in the FT! I guess you wrote it, or at least part of it, last October, but it's a timeless piece and who knows how long the FT have been waiting for the right opportunity to present itself? Your piece has also been well received at BoardGameGeek, too. (I've playtested for Martin Wallace at Stabcon in the past, so quite literally - or, more to the point, olfactorily - resemble his remark...)

My question: does history record which of the usual suspects introduced you to Settlers back in the day?

[adamsmithjr]

Thanks! Shame BGG didn't just post the link and an extract - makes it harder for me to tell the FT that the piece was a good idea if it gets no traffic from places like the Geek. But nice to see it got a warm response.
(And kind of you to suggest that it was researched in October 2009 but I fear it's older than that with some tweaks to make it seem more up to date... it really was a struggle to persuade them to publish.)

The friend in question was Liz Smith-Lovegrove. The fof was Al Halsby. And so it all began...

[jiggery_pokery]

And so a column was born, years later! (Commenters in the thread explain that they posted the whole piece because they thought you had to be a subscriber to see it, incorrectly, and that the piece's age was also shown by Warfrog since having changed its name to Treefrog.)

In response to a more recent Tweet of yours, Germany won the team element of this year's World Sudoku Championship. The UK's sixth place was its best yet, though, off the top of my quite possibly inaccurate head, and - notably - ahead of the US on its home turf. Suggestions that the perennial powerhouse US team was strongly weakened by its two best solvers being the ones setting this year's competition are, frankly, entirely relevant.