Returning to its usual Ascension weekend date and everyone’s favourite venue, the Linköping University campus, LinCon 2022 was its usual strong and nerdy self. I met loads of old and new acquaintances, gave a talk on Nils Mattsson Kiöping to a small but enthusiastic audience, bought two games at the flea market and enjoyed the auction camaraderie without buying anything there.
And I played eight games:
- Acquire (1964). Start companies, buy stock, make sure that your startups get bought up.
- Secret Hitler (2016). Social deduction à la Werewolf and The Resistance.
- Splendor (2014). Abstract colours and numbers.
- Viticulture (2013). Winery worker placement.
- Santa Maria (2017). Competitive solitaire cube pusher.
- 7 Wonders (2010). Civilisation builder. The only game I’ve ever really enjoyed with more than five players.
- Tichu (1991). Two good old Chinese card games combined into an even better hybrid.
- Space Lane Trader (2022). A competitive solitaire that should have been a video game.
2022 was my ninth LinCon. Here are my impressions of the previous one.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Is Viticulture a game you would recommend? During our last board game-evening we concluded that we have played the games we had to pieces, so need to find something neew until next time.
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Yeah, anyone who likes Agricola, Caverna and similar worker placement games will enjoy Viticulture. I mean, I like it even though I don’t care about wine.
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People grow grapes to eat as well, and to dry to make raisins and sultanas.
When I was a kid I knew an old Quaker couple who ran a vineyard. All of their fruit went into making raisins.
They also ran their place as a retirement home for horses that were too old to ride or work any more. Rather than see them go to the knackers to be turned into pet food, they would just take in the old horses for free and let them roam their property until they died of old age. They did have some slight ulterior motive – they used the horse manure as fertiliser to grow roses, and had the most beautiful roses I have ever seen.
Visiting their place was cool – I could sneak down to the drying shed and gorge myself on raisins, with all of these old horses looming peacefully all around.
So I grew up with this idea that Quakers are Good People, based on that sample of two. I don’t know if all Quakers are as good as those old folks were. I also knew their son, who was one of my father’s teaching colleagues – in short, he was not a practising Quaker and he was a prick, nothing like his parents at all. He and his wife had lived in Papua New Guinea for quite a while, when it was still an Australian protectorate, and when they first came back they would whinge on endlessly about how the servants were always lazy and useless, etc. Not nice people at all. If they were still alive, they wouldn’t want to go back there now – *very* dangerous, and I’m not just talking about malaria, dysentery, etc.
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