This is from Kakassia, in Russian central Asia. I never heard of Kakassia either. Credit to David McCord for noticing and putting out this game. It's not like he was sitting at the table listening to the rules in Kakassian or Russian.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Twelve. I still like that earlier blue raft board, but .. complications. Blue dice, with some felt marker work? Mmm .. looking at drilling again, somehow properly. Ahh .. the dice and the boards have different blues. Simple glass pieces that you look through to see a number? No, but points for creativity. Discs with Roman numerals? Has advantages. Improper angle of dice would not be an issue. One may be able to get discs made of shell at Michael's, as you can see on the picaria page.
 
 
 
 

Time to work on Safari Race, tighten it up and test it more. It's competitive, yet a lot of game play is co-operative trading.

What is an Australian animal? Is a crocodile an Australian animal? How about box jellyfish? Are owls not Australian animals?
 
 
 
 

Atlantis Chess is going to get proper pieces, plastic, maybe resin cubes, chess pieces and seahorses, yellow and blue ("Ukrainian colors" as one site put it).
 
 
 
 

Thinking out loud. Escape The Room - Essen. Games, distractions, spending your money, food, navigation, crowds, nice games, meeting people, bathrooms, spending more money, carrying stuff. Language barriers. For booth people and content creators, you have considerations like meetings, sales and supplies, people need to be in booths, sometimes money gets stolen.
 

Essen Spiel convention is apparently a neat experience. But if you want to play games it's the wrong place.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I caught somewhere that the Germans who fought there would have called it the Bryansk Orel battle or something, not Kursk. That got me curious. I note that Kursk is a city, and the battle is never presented as urban. Kursk is both a city and an oblast (pronounced with a long o in Russian). It seems to me the battle of Kursk was in Orel/Oryol oblast, Kursk oblast and Belgorod oblast. Bryansk city would have been a transport hub, and the battle bumped into the fringes of Ukraine.
 

Volgograd, then known as Stalingrad, was southeast of all that. How cold could that be?