The World According to Taquoriaan

I don’t think I reviewed a board game here yet. And I love playing board games. Winter is the perfect time to play them and one of the games I got to play the last few weeks is a game I got for my birthday a year ago, I think. It’s called Carcasonne – The Discovery. Basically what you need to do is draw a tile from the stack, attach it somewhere to the map laid out on the table and choose what you want to do: put one of your pawns on it or not, when you decide to claim it, you have to decide if you’re claiming sea, mountains or plains. The goal is to get your claimed territory as big as you can, but not too big, because you need to finish it.

The rules are really straightforward and because of the tiled board setup, every game is different. You need to use strategy, but also depend on luck. I really like the different variants of Carcasonne because of that and the fact it looks nice. The artwork of the game, the drawings are nicely done and after playing everything fits back in the box without everything getting messed up.

I think of all the versions of Carcasonne I played, I like The Discovery best, because it’s more interesting because of the variation: a lot of different factors have to be weighed in. Do you choose to be a sailor and count on the tiles of the sea and the harbour cities, do you count on the mountains and only get points for the cities in the mountains and on the neighbouring plains or do you choose to play for plains and get points for the tiles of the plain, but not for the cities. A big mountain ridge can score a lot of points, but if you draw tiles without cities on them, your mountain range will be worth nothing. However, if you go for the plain, you know you get at least one point for every tile that makes up your plain. If I had to rate the game on a five point scale, I’d give it 3.5 points out of five. I like the game a lot, but it’s not the best game I ever played or a favourite game.

Link: Carcasonne – Discovery (links to boardgamegeek.com)

Some friends of mine were talking about a great new game they discovered on the internet. You can play it online, in your browser without the need of downloading software. It’s free too! They said it was killing their productivity because it was so addicting. This was a very good reason for me NOT to look at that website.

Today everything changed. I had nothing to do, I was sitting on my couch and had nowhere to go, because I twisted a muscle in my back. At some point I read all the items in my RSS feed reader, there was no backlog of podcasts to listen to. So I decided to have a quick look at Bejeweled 2. It could be potentially interesting to investigate, since I wanted to write a brief review about it.

It’s a simple and fun game, which reminds me of Tetris on the GameBoy and I do remember playing a similar game on the Sega Mega Drive (I realise I just dated myself ). There are different gems in different colours and shapes. The goal is to align three (or more) in a row. You can swap with gems next to each other to get the right colours aligned. There’s no speed or time limit and it doesn’t really get more difficult after leveling up, so if you’re bored and want to play some mindless game, this is a perfect one. Is it addictive? Not for me, but apparently it is for other people. I don’t miss it when doing something else, so it’s safe to try out, as far as I’m concerned. :pipe:

I know I praised this program before on other sites, but I like this application so much I want to dedicate a blog post to it. Last October I bought a game for my PC that changed my life. The game’s goal is to improve your general fitness level. You get a personal trainer, called Maya, and this animated coach guides you through the exercises. Every ten workout sessions you do a fitness evaluation. The application will use that data to tailor future workouts. Workouts are never the same, it’s also possible to add some props like a stability ball, hand weights, an aerobic step and a heart rate monitor. This was you can vary your workouts endlessly. If you don’t like a certain exercise during a session, you can select another one that will train the same area of your body.

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