Posts Tagged ‘review’

Reviewing popular game systems: Piecepack, Green Box of Games and Pyramid Arcade

7th May 2019

I’ve played 105 different games in February this year. I didn’t buy or borrow 105 games, though. I only bought 3 game system with which I played all those games. And I could have played hundreds more.

A game system is not a single game but a set of items with which you can play multiple games. A deck of playing cards is a well-known example of a game system, or dominoes, or marbles. I love the versatility of playing cards, they are so small and can play hundreds (if not thousands) of games, so I was interested in others. A game system is also a great tool for game designers to help invent new games.

I bought 3 of the most popular game systems: a Piecepack, the Green Box of Games and Pyramid Arcade (with Looney Pyramids aka Icehouse Pieces) and tried them out.
This is my review of them. I looked at the quality of their components, the games you can play with them, their rulebooks and the design of each system.

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Erasable Notebooks Review

26th August 2018

Erasable notebooks are notebooks made of special paper which you can write on with a special pen which you can erase again and again. I really love the concept and how it’s more efficient and environmental friendly.
I had recently bought 6 of them: Rocketbook Everlast, Elfinbook, NewYes Notebook, InfiniteBook (also called EcoBook), WhyNote Book and Esquoia Notebook. With so many to compare I made a video review:

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In search of a good CMS

21st October 2011

I just spent a few days trying to get an overview of all the different CMS out there nowadays.
I restricted my search to free OpenSource PHP CMS. Those are still hundreds, but at least that rules out some like ExpressionEngine, CushyCMS (not free) and PlonedotCMSAlfrescoUmbracoRadiant (not PHP) and DokuWikiWordPressSerendipity (not a CMS). (I was surprised that, according to several sources, WordPress is the most popular CMS by far! Although I can see how you can include it in your definition of a CMS, I only wanted to concentrate on those which were meant to be used as one.)

  1. I had a look at about 100 different CMS at opensourceCMS.com. (Their demo for each CMS listed there is a pretty cool feature that let’s you at least see one of the most important parts of a CMS at once: the admin interface.) Then I did a bit of research, i.e. googling what others use and like and don’t like and tried a few others which were not listed at opensourceCMS.com.
    A few really popular CMS failed already at that stage: Joomla!TYPO3CMS Made SimpleXOOPSe107 and SilverStripe. (I.e. their admin interface failed to convince me, I haven’t had a look beyond that at that point).
  2. In the end I ended up with 18 different CMS I installed and tested more thoroughly.
  3. I will go into detail about 7 of them below…

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