Our second game was Seeland, a Gunther Burkhardt and Wolfgang Kramer game that I had played earlier in the week and really enjoyed. This is a clever tactical placement game where you are collecting crop and mill cards and placing them on a map to encircle the mills with high scoring crops. Very easy to explain and play but it uses a double rondel with one determining what tile you can take and place while the other limits your flexibility in choosing tiles. If you jump ahead one turn to grab a valuable tile, your ability to do so is limited until other players catch you up - and if they choose not to jump ahead, your choice of tile can be forced upon you by the player to your right. Quite tricky and unfogiving at times, as Steve found out.

The three newbies concentrated early in the game on getting all their mills on the board whereas I spent most of the game with just one or two mills in play but scoring them pretty regularly. This seemed to pay off, particularly as I was also trying to ensure they were surrounded by all three crop types to gain bonus points. It was also intersting that the extra turn markers that Mark K kept picking up didn't give him s much of an advantage as I had expected, so the trade-off of losing points through uncovering farms against gaining an extra turn seems quite well balanced. Very good game in my opinion and a refreshing change from lots of the recent games that seem overloaded with lots of mechanics. Oh, and I won.