I'm 33 years old, I live in a small city in Portugal - Leiria. I'm married to Ana and I have a 6 year old daughter named Maria.

I love football and I'm a Sporting Clube de Portugal fan.

I've started to play games as a child. I've played Monopoly a lot and a game published in Portugal called Petroleo.
In the year 2000, following my passion for board games and not seeing them published in Portugal, I've ordered some titles from a French website. It was a blind purchase because I didn't really had access to sufficient information in order to choose those games. I got lucky. I bought Civilization, Settlers of Catan, Serenissima and El Grande. All of them from Descartes. From that time on I've never stopped playing board games.

I went to Spiel 06 and 07 where I met Martin Wallace and Mac Gerdts, these days, my favorite designers.

I like all kinds of games but have some particular interest in heavy ones.

I change my rates all the time. I'm a mood player.

My HOT 10 games are games that could potentialy be at my TOP 10 but for some reason are not.

I run a portuguese blog about boardgames with my gaming friends ( http://spielportugal.blogspot.com/) and we have an annual prize for the best game - "Jogo do Ano" - http://spielportugal.blogspot.com/2007/08/jogo-do-ano-2006-e...
http://spielportugal.blogspot.com/2007/08/walther-mac-gerdts...

"Jogo do Ano 2006 - Imperial, by Mac Gerdts"
"Jogo do Ano 2007 - Brass, by Martin Wallace"
"Jogo do Ano 2008 - Agricola, by Uwe Rosenberg"

Spiel Portugal also organizes an annual convention, LeiriaCon ( http://leiriacon.blogspot.com/)


My ratings:
I don't use the BGG rating system.
Usually we tend to want to play different games in different stages of our "gaming life" and this system isn't fair enough. Plus there are some games that I don't like to play because they didn't make the click, they simply didn't work for me, but they're still good decent games. In this case even if I don't like to play the game but if it's a solid design, I would rate it accordingly. At least I'll try to be fair to the game.

My ratings would be based in time of play/fun and also design, components, willing to play and personal preferences, of course.

Personal Best Game of the Year and runner up.

2009 -
2008 - Agricola (Giants)
2007 - Brass (Notre Dame)
2006 - Imperial (Here I Stand)
2005 - Twilight Struggle (Caylus)
2004 - Power Grid (Antiquity)
2003 - Princes of the Renaissance (Santiago)
2002 - Age of Steam (Puerto Rico)
2001 - Liberté (Hive)
2000 - Princes of Florence (La Citta)