I love this game, it's one of the gems of Swedish gaming IMHO

Seriously, this game is really underrated. The mechanisms are very interesting, the balance between peace and agression, the different events, and the partly co-op during wartime. And the theme is great. I believe this is a really fine mix between Ameritrash and Eurogame, although the mechanisms are more Euro-like.

What do you mean - underrated?

It is probably the most rated Swedish game that hasn't been published outside Sweden. And considering how much text is needed to translate in order to play this game, it is quite amazing how many non-Scandinaves have actually played it.

Actually, the Swedish expansion "Drakborgen 2" was split into 2 expansions for the English release - Heroes and Catacombs. So the Swedish expansion is both.

"Improved" can be disputed. But maybe I'm just old-fashioned. OOP again (2008).

Also interesting in that it's mostly a rip-off of Kingmaker.

Is this actually a Swedish game?

No. It's British, AFAIK.

Wow, what a rating! :0

Perhaps not quite as good as Die Macher.

A well deserved rating, I'm afraid.

I played the old version of this game this weekend, so it does indeed exist. It's called "Bondespelet" and the map and cards are a bit different; even a bit more complicated mechanics. I think the old map is actually a bit nicer. Anyway, we played it when drunk and we had a good laugh at the silly texts on the cards. Halfway we got bored and ended it.

Not sure this is Swedish either.

The first edition is from the 60s, so I'm pretty sure it's Swedish.

I loved playing this game as a kid! The game board is 3-dimensional with a card-board map hiding hidden reefs that you had to avoid with your merchant ships, using sea-charts to navigate your way to port. I don't know how much fun it'd be to play today, but for a kid, it was tons of fun.

Quite innovative design in having a square board with prepunctured dots equally spaced over the board in the sea areas, where each ship (symbolized by a colourful plastic tanker with a long needlelike keel) has to move over it and at each dot has to try to press the keel needle all the way down to the bottom without meeting any obstacle. The trick is that it's combined with placing this board on top of a plastic tray where there are elevated areas (shallow grounds or shoals) that will immediately impede movement and cause the ship to go to the nearest repair yard for extensive hull repairs if running into the shoals. Et voilà, you have a 3 dimensional game!
The board being square can be placed in one of four directions, and there are four nautical charts, one for each placement, that shows the grounds and shoals of each direction. On top of this there are Royal Navy patrol ships searching for contrabands to the Germans to avoid, as well as equally nervous and trigger-happy Deutsche Marine that would like to know why on earth you went to a British port to load coal (i.e. Hull) when das Dritte Reich could supply you with the same thing from its mines? You must be a spy, or worse!Play it, and you would know what I mean.
Personally my favourite is in fact to go to Hull and load some much-needed-in-Sweden coal. (The coast area there is one of the most navigation-friendly whichever navigational chart is used.)

Personally I always have problems outside the Danish island of Zealand, where there is a ground I always hit before going through the Kiel Kanal...

Not sure about this one either.

Not really a good game, but huge fun. Get drunk first, and it will be perfect!

There is in fact one original Sjörövarön from the late 1970's (early 1980's?) with tin miniature figures from Joker Design, Brio Games. I have it here...

I thoroughly agree with being drunk to enjoy this game to be a prerequisite, at least when you are more than 15 years old...

Don't like it at all and I got my copy rather late in life. But painted tin figures is nice.

This too got a lot of play. Lots of chance involved, but also some skill. Among the many Swedish horseracing games, I think this one held up very well.

I have enjoyed many plays of this game. The auctioning and betting opens up for lots of player interaction, but the game also has its drawbacks.

The most interesting thing about this game, I think, is the betting.

Played it to some extent when it was new, and thought it was great fun. However, when I played it again this summer, I realized chance has way too much influence.

I hadn't seen it when I created the list, but a few days later I stumbled across a demo of it, and now I've got a copy of my own.

This is one of the very few games my girlfriend enjoy. It´s a great party game that many of my non-gamer friends love. As of my experience sober gamers don´t like this one.

One of the best Swedish games ever made!
And great fun too!

I just love what they named the expansion - "Cash is Kong"

Good light card game. It tends to overstay its welcome though. You get to build your tower and attack the others. Technically, it can go on forever (although it seldome does).

Not forever - if the deck runs out, the monkey wins (and all the players lose).

A game I've never won, but it's fun now and then to play. Rainy summer days is the big memeory of this for me. (Och det där var svensk grammatik involverad i utrikisk).

We've tried to play it but it seems unplayable and really unbalanced (one of the two sides, don't remember which, was chanceless). It took hours and nothing much happened.

Yes. I'm not sure which version of the game this is though - most of my life it was called Nya Finans - this is either very old, or pretty new. I haven't kept up with new Swedish boardgames in years, so I could very easily have missed this.

Datafinans
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/14673

I prefer Finans to Nya Finans, because in the latter all you have to do is to get hold of #36 and build, and you're a winner. It's not that easy in Finans.

Another English game.

You sure this is English? It's widely known as a Swedish game, though of course the idea can have come from somewhere else. What's the original game, then?

This is an interesting but rather long game. You don't even move the boats on tiles, you move them x number of centimeters. I could have done with more interesting randomizing mechanics, actually, but it's fair and nice.

I'm surprised at the high ratings for this game. It has excellent production values, but apart from that, I think it's a ghastly game - uninteresting AND unbalanced.

I wouldn't call it ghastly, but it didn't exactly impress me either. Rated it a four.

It's one of few games me and the buddies stopped playing before the end. It's rather lousy and we gave our game away. Don't buy it!

an attempt at Junta without the board (which makes it rather dull)