Games... a component survey

On BoardGameGeek, I accidentally (accidents happen a lot) came across the card games Inquisitio, Modern Society, and Soul Hunters, for which there seemed to actually be a little bit of buzz about their public release at the Essen Spieltage (which is next week). The publisher had a pre-Essen deal on: the games for 18€ each, or 45€ for the three, shipping included.

(Click pictures for enlargement opportunities.)



What a great deal! I jumped right on it.

1. I have a feeling that games with slightly darker/cynical themes like these could be appealing to my Scandinavian Club friends, who seem inclined toward that kind of thing rather than perhaps mercilessly making fun of fantasy or colonial themes like they seem to like to do.
   
2. Also, it's difficult to get a substantial card game for less than $20 around here. Citadels is something like $21 online, plus taxes and shipping. To buy the same game in-store bumps it up to the $27 range plus tax. With this deal, these are ~$25 each, including shipping all the way from Finland, so I'm not complaining.
   
3. The designers seem to have a presence on BoardGameGeek and managed to generate good publicity buzz over the years as they've been working on them, so hey, they deserve something for their efforts (as opposed to... um... *cough*).
   
4. I still have a little bit of money left over from the payment for my work on Zanziar, and using the money to support a rival game publisher gives me a warm fuzzy feeling... like the one that some people get from boycotting Wal-Mart.

They said that they'd ship the games as separate packages and sent them out at the beginning of last week. I picked them up from the post office today. Finnish economy post has been very quick lately. That's interesting.




Each envelope was lovingly packed and addressed by hand (forgive the romanticism). Despite the games just being wrapped in a loop of bubble wrap and stuffed into a regular envelope, they arrived relatively unharmed. The envelopes were a little ripped but only a couple of box corners got dinged, and only very slighly. Actually, one of the envelopes was so torn that it's a wonder the game didn't fall out of the bubble wrap and through the hole! (You can see this envelope in the upper corner of the second photo above.)

Some BGG users would complain like crazy about this. They like their games to come in stuffed shipping boxes or real padded envelopes. I'm not so picky. They got to me in good shape. That's enough.

The boxes were designed to be a set, with the fake book effect.


There was a small puncture wound on the Modern Society box, so I carefully pulled back the paper label, filled the hole with glue, and replaced the label. I'm obsessive-compulsive like that:


But let's crack them open and see what's inside.


All three games have similar components: rulesheets in Finnish, Swedish, and English, 144 cards (of which some are advertisement cards), and some wooden chips.

Each game also has a card that's got a brief comment from the designer on it in both Finnish and English (in Modern Society it's printed on the back of the player scoretrack cards). I think that this is a really nice touch. Along with the advertisement cards, it's a good use for blank spots on the card sheet and saves up valuable space in the rulebook (where such comments are traditionally placed, if at all).

The cards themselves are of average quality; the cuts weren't completely clean and I had to colour in a small rip on one of the cards with my Finnish-permanent-marker-of-Japanese-manufacture. Because of the rough edges, I imagine that they would wear very readily. But they are the Euro-sized cards like in Agricola, requiring sleeves that I can only buy online, and once sleeved, they won't fit back in the box anyway. I'll consider making tuckboxes for them a little bit wider than Euro-sized cards. I made new trays for the boxes, with more slots, so that the cards can be separated by type.

Inquisitio is the only one of these games whose components are fully bilingual (the others only have English card texts). The cards in Inqusitio that don't require a back face are Finnish on one side and English on the other.

The English writing isn't perfect and some explanations could be more clear, but it seems to have been done in-house (there's only a translator credit on the Swedish rulesheets) and is very good. Only Soul Hunters has significant game text on the cards and they are straightforward rules texts presented in a consistent style. The other games use symbols.

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I'm going to organize a "Heart of Winter EPIC FAIL Tea Party", which will happen between the end of final exams and Christmas, I think. For maximum "Heart of Winter" effect. Naturally we can't get Finnish-winter darkness here. It'll be a tea party to celebrate all kinds of EPIC FAIL with the playing of non-EPIC FAIL board/card games like these. Hopefully by then I'll be done with and have been paid for my EPIC FAIL work, and have more money to buy non-EPIC FAIL things.

Hmm. What else was I going to say? My pictures are showing off my new Kashmiri shawl/blanket. I got it for $5!