Thursday, October 15, 2026
The Wire
Posts from 19 of the hobby's best blogs, reviewers and publishers — updated every few hours. Every story links to its original source.
10 stories · Tick up to 12 stories and we'll write you a quick roundup.
My initial thoughts on Forest Shuffle: Smoky Mountains strategy based on the first 30 plays.
A look at the popularity of 18xx games in Finland from 2003 to 2025.
The latest addition to my 18xx collection is 18RoyalGorge: The Rails of Fremont County and the Royal Gorge Wars. I bumped into this on BGG, I think, and the game sounded good enough so I bought a copy. This was on Kic…
Earlier this year I decided to host a small game day for the contributors of Lautapeliopas. I’ve been doing yoga, and the yoga school rents out the place. It’s a lovely place and good for small gatherings. For the fir…
For-Ex had the “why on earth did you buy this game” letter on back of the box. I’m exactly the kind of person to buy a game after reading that. I played the original four times before passing it on. It was a weird gam…
We played Guàn Dàn yesterday. John McLeod (of Pagat.com) was visiting Tampere recently and recommended this Chinese climbing card game to me. According to him, it’s very popular in China right now. It has a couple of …
This has been a good week of games. We started with afternoon games on Monday. One player dropped out, so the original plan of a four-player game of Imperial turned into a three-player game of Indonesia. I had not pla…
This week has been good for board games. On Tuesday, I met a friend for a two-player game of 18GB: The Railways of Great Britain, and yesterday we played another game of Indonesia. Two-player 18GB is a fine 18xx exper…
I wanted to do a redraw of the Chicago & NorthWestern board. I own the original Winsome Games edition. The Rio Grande version has a nicer board, though it’s a bit plain and doesn’t include the most obvious usability f…
We had a great game session yesterday. We played Indonesia! The appearance of the new third edition made me realize Indonesia would be a great match for my current game group, so I quickly reacquired a copy. I got the…
