Balise

SPIEL 2025 in Essen

Published on 26 October 202527 October 2025 by Balise1 Comment

It has become a tradition: in October, we go to Essen in Germany for SPIEL. We have our habits, we know how things work, and we have a grand, if exhausting time. And it’s a great way to test a lot of things and to make opinions and quick reviews! And to come back with, well, a bunch of loot to enjoy between two editions of SPIEL 😉

A bunch of board games and associated misc elements - Ink, Bohemians, Railroad Tiles, Wispwood, a book "Boardgames that tell stories", expansions for Pixies and Sea Salt & Paper, RAVEL, Furchtloss, Kingdom Legacy expansions, A Carnivore Did it, Les Derniers Droïdes, Weave, Kingdom Crossing, Just 3 folds, Floral and Similo are set on a table.

The loot doesn’t reflect everything we played (and there’s a few things in there that are not a direct consequence of what we played in this edition), so here’s everything we saw!

Azul Duel

A two-player game; two boards with slots and tokens, a score board in the middle of the table, and 5 circles (four small, one large) with various colored tokens on them.

Azul is a classic, declined in many versions, and this version goes back to the idea of the first game, but in a 2-player version. The original Azul already plays pretty well with two players, but I still appreciated the adjustments to the rules that make it more tactical – a bit more choices that depend on the exact timing (and not only on the opportunity to deny something to your opponent), and I liked the idea of building your grid as you go. We’re not really on the market for 2-player games these days, but if we had been, it would have been under consideration for a buy (especially since we don’t own the original version).

Take Time

A round abstract clock face with white and dark blue numbered cards around it in six piles. The sum of the piles is ascending clockwise starting from 1.

A cooperative game where players try to solve constraints of a round clock with the cards that they are given – but they can only discuss strategy before looking at said cards. Pretty neat, probably has the potential to get very difficult challenges – but it felt like, for us, it would fit the same niche as The Crew (which we both preferred). Very pretty, though, and probably shorter games than The Crew too.

Locus

A sheet of paper divided into multiple colored areas with grids and a few boxes of the grid crossed. There are also a few cards with colored polyominos, and a stack of LOCUS boxes in the background.

Locus has a very clear (and acknowledged) inspiration from Ganz Schön Clever, except that instead of dice, you get cards with polyominoes – players take turn choosing one and crossing the corresponding patterns in the different grids, with a significant chance to have combos that yield more crossings on the sheet (and hence more points). I liked it well enough, I think it’s also less fiddly than Ganz Schön Clever, which has a few iffy corner cases that require going back to the rules a bit too often, but it wasn’t enough of a wow factor to get a copy.

Bohemians

A lot of colorful cards that evoke artistry and Paris

Bohemians is a deck building game where the currency that you have to get new cards depends on the half-symbols that you manage to combine into full symbols when you get your cards, with additional actions on the better cards (and bad things happening to you if you forget to work to support your artist ways). Cool mechanics (I had previously enjoyed the symbol combination mechanic in After Us), pretty theme, and made by Portal Games, for which I have a personal fondness – we got a box. And with the box I also got the third book of Ignacy Trzewiczek “Boardgames that tell stories” (I had enjoyed the first two) and got it signed since he was around when I got it 🙂

Postcards

I liked the theme of Postcards – traveling through France and sending postcards – that sounded nice; and the first random postcard that I started the game with depicted Carbonnade Flamande (a personal favorite); but the mechanics of the game (filling in a few tasks, getting the opportunistic bonus and some set collection) fell a bit flat for us.

A Carnivore Did It!

A Carnivore Dit It! is a cooperative deduction game where you try to solve series of puzzles where you get cards with animals, some statements where you know that a number of them are true (and the rest are false) and try to deduct as a group who’s the culprit. Fun times, a lot of scenarios to go through, and my love of logical puzzles made me grab a copy.

Railroad Tiles

Tiles with railroads and streets, in a common market and placed in front of players as the start of a transport network.

I enjoyed Railroad Ink (a series of roll&writes where you make a rail and road network), so I was very curious about the tile version of it. Players get a set of tiles to add to their network. During the game, they also get to add trains, cars and commuters to their network and score points accordingly; a few bonus tiles and the largest rectangular area of the board round up the final score. This sort of things tickles my brain exactly right, so we got a copy, even if Pierre was less convinced than I was (but then: it has a solo mode!)

Sanibel

A market of tiles representing seashells on a beach, and two player boards showing said shells organized on a hex-and-diamonds grid.

Sanibel is a set collection game with a placement on a board and a seashell theme. I liked the theme and the different shapes of the tiles (diamonds and hexagons made of three diamonds), but again not enthusiastically so. And the table was a bit too small, which led to an incident of board flipping that was not very pleasant 😛 (Not the fault of the game, though 🙂 )

Wispwood

A wheel with square tiles representing firs on the back and various colorful wisps/spirits on the front side, with polyominos on the wheel between each pair of tiles. Players assemble these tiles in front of them in a grid.

Wispwood is a tile laying game where, at each turn, players choose a colored tile from a common reserve and one of the polyominoes next to it to build an increasingly large grid that eventually gets scored along multiple axes. We didn’t get to play it, only got the explanation, but I’m curious about the feel of the game and we’ll try to find an open table in the next few days.

EDIT and we did find a table, and it was indeed delightful, and we bought a box.

7 Wonders Dice

In the 7 Wonders Extended Universe, we know have: the dice game! This is a roll and write – at every round, a set of dice is rolled, of which each player chooses one (at the same time) and adds it to their player board for various effects. We could only play for a few numbers of rounds since it was the very end of the day, but again the overall feeling wasn’t enthusiastic.

The Hanging Gardens

A market with tiles containing arched windows, and a player tableau showing a line of 4 of these tiles and a line of 2 above it. Other tokens and coins on the table too.

The Hanging Gardens is a tile laying game where you try to make gardens irrigated in the same way as your objective card while adding animals, plants, humans, and try to optimize the associated points. Pretty neat, but lacked a bit of a “wow” factor.

Castle Combo

Two tableaux of 3x3 cards with cartoon characters, with gold coins on top of them, and a market from which players would pick said cards.

Castle Combo is a tableau-building game where players build a 3×3 grid of characters that interact in various ways to yield points. It was released last year, but there was an extension this year, which gave us the opportunity to play it; the publisher wasn’t selling the base box today, but it’s going to get on my next shopping list because I really enjoyed it – it’s fast, every decision matters, and it’s tight and well made.

City Tour

A colorful and very curvy road being built with tiles containing roads, markers and traveler. On the road, there's a plastic bus with two blue passengers in it.

City Tour may well have been designed as “what if Tsuro, but cooperative” – all the players are driving the same bus by adding tiles at the end of its path, gathering passengers and dropping them at various points. Cute, and the box seems to have more options than the basic version we played, but not much more than that for us.

Ladybugs

Ladybugs was the unexpected territory control game of the day – you play as a colony of ladybugs that try to control fields of daisies. When putting a ladybug on the field, you get to place it at a distance equal to the numbers of dots on one of the previous ladybugs you have placed, orthogonally; this yields a nice puzzle to be able to place your bugs while planning your next moves. Pretty cool, not a buy.

Restart

Colored plastic tiles numbered from 1 to 16, in ascending order.

Restart was the most puzzling game we played on Friday. It presents itself as a riff between Rummikub and Uno; players place numbered tiles in increasing rows, with a few special tiles allowing them to manipulate the board a bit. Whether it was because we were only two players or because we weren’t playing aggressively enough, neither of us got the point of the game (which doesn’t happen often!)

INK

Tiles with multiple colors (purple / cyan / dark blue / yellow / red), installed in front of players; a lot of small tokens in the shape of adorable ink bottles.

In INK, players try to get rid of their ink bottles by placing them on a tiled board that they build during the game – when an area is large enough, you get to place ink bottles on the few places in that area that welcome them. Larger areas yield bonuses that can create small combos. It was a very pleasant game and the ink bottles were adorable and I’m looking forward to playing it again with the box we bought.

Cosmolancer

A 6x5 grid filled with colorful tiles with numbers on them, as well as yellow and blue camera tokens.

Cosmolancer is the new edition of a 1994 game (something we learnt after playing it 🙂 ). Players take turns placing score tiles and scoring tokens on a board to maximize their own score and minimize their opponent’s. Good design, tight game, a couple of things that we didn’t necessarily fully understand/score correctly during our game. But also not something we’d expect to put on the table.

Dying Message

Abstract cards trying to represent a crime scene, and a set of cards with faces and text associated to letters.

The accidental social game of the day. In Dying Message, one player plays the murder victim and the others the detectives. The murder victim has a set of abstract cards to communicate who killed them from beyond the grave, and the detectives must decide, given a list of suspects, who the victim may be talking about. I took the role of the murder victim, and all my detectives failed at understanding me 😦 This might be fun with the right group, but we don’t think we’re necessarily part of that type of group 🙂

TRND

8 cards around a deck and a discard, representing chairs of three different shapes and three different colors.

Trnd is a game where you try to collect the largest possible set of a certain type of chairs while discarding the rest. And you can only discard identical cards that have a common characteristic (color or shape) with the current discard. Intriguing, but not quite enough to make us get a box.

Knitting Circle

Boards with buttons and yarn, a wheel with two cat tokens and yarn samples around them, and knitting pattern-describing cards.

In Knitting Circle, players create clothes from squares of wool that their cats bring them. There’s two phases in each round: moving cats around a wheel to get wool pieces, and assembling said wool pieces to clothes, with various bonuses for specific colors, patterns or shape. Cute, and the switch between player-interaction phases to get materials and more solitaire puzzle during assembly is pleasant. Didn’t click quite enough to get a box though.

Scribble City

Cards with polyominos and sheets of paper with a lot of roads and polyominos drawn on them. There's a set of colored pencils next to the sheet of paper.

Scribble City is a game where you draft cards to add roads and polyomino buildings to a map. A few objectives and additional bonuses make it a bit more strategic, and overall this would have been a buy… if their shipment had arrived in time for Essen! As it is, I’ll probably try to get a copy at some point still.

R.A.V.E.L.

A grid of 8 colored dice (3x3 without a center) with cards with various dice-symbols on each side of the square.

Ravel is a solo (or “two people working the problem together”) game where you have a set of dice, constraints on how you can move/change them, and objective to fill. It’s a very nice puzzle, it has a few ways to adjust the difficulty (we were either very lucky or very good at it today), and it’s delightful. I got a box.

Hues and Cues

A board containing a large amount of colors going from brown to green vertically and from brown to purple horizontally (and then some), with a bunch of conic tokens all in the same area around red/orange hues.

Hues and Cues is a party game where someone tries to give clues for the other players to guess a color. The closer people are from the color to be guessed, the more points the clue giver and the guessers get. We had a few laughs in the couple of rounds that we played – including with someone who was very colorblind but evidently surprisingly good at color games 😀 Fun to play, but not a fit for our usual games.

Just 3 Folds

Round cards with colorful patterns, a 90° mirror, and some heavily folded yellow, pink and blue origami paper.

Just 3 Folds is an origami game. You get a picture and a piece of colored paper, and you have to re-create the picture by folding the piece of paper only three times. The additional twist is that you’re actually creating only a quarter of the image, and check your work by putting it against an angle mirror. Cute concept, and we got a copy – it may work for us under some circumstances.

Flip 7

We hadn’t played Flip 7 yet, which is now fixed! It’s a push your luck game, described as “a mix of black jack and Uno”. You can continue getting cards as long as you wish, but if you get two identical ones, you lose (and the winner is the one with the largest score). Pretty fun and the Deluxe edition (which we played) is gorgeous, but the game itself doesn’t necessarily warrant the price point of said deluxe edition. That said, might get a deck of the regular edition at some point – looks like an easy filler game.

The Last Droids

A central tray containing two columns of cards, and player boards with resources (oil, cogs, circuits, batteries). There are a lot of colorful cards with robots on the table.

In The Last Droids, you get cards that you can either buy for their effects or recycle to get resources to buy said cards. It’s a post-apocalyptic theme where you try to rebuild houses, and the cards are defunct robots (that you can either repair for actions or recycle). The originality comes from the four-player game, in which players team up in two teams, and draft cards, giving the other one, depending on the turn, to their adversary or to their partner. I really really enjoyed it and I got a box. I’m curious to see how it plays with other numbers of players too!

Vantage

A large box containing a very (very) large number of cards, behind a player mat with dice and tokens.

We only got a table explanation of this game and we have very little chance of getting a table, but it looks quite fascinating. It’s an open world exploration game where players are (in game) physically separated but can communicate to achieve a common mission; there’s a metric ton of cards and it’s NOT a campaign game, just a game with a lot of randomization of the starting conditions. I’m VERY curious and I’d love to give it a try (but it’s also sold out, so even the leap of faith is not an option).

Propolis

A player board with resources an a couple of cards; a bunch of colored cards with bee tokens on them.

Propolis is a game with bees (and you get a bunch of beeples) where you collect resources to build cards that give you discounts for future buys. It is very reminiscent of Splendor, with a few more strategic elements, and it’s really nice, but not distinct enough niche-wise from Splendor to my taste to warrant a buy.

Carnival of Sins

Black, white and gold playing cards showing masks on the back and sin representations on the front, and a set of black and golden dice.

Carnival of Sins looks pretty neat, concept-wise – each player has a hand of 7 cards that they will play entirely to get dice that are rolled at the beginning of the round, with various cards effects (get the highest die, get an odd and even die, that sort of things), with a few backstabby effects too. The cards are also very pretty. But we did run in at least 3 corner cases that were not mentioned in the rulebook during our game, which made it feel a bit incomplete, rule-wise.

Into the Machine

A colorful board with various symbols, a track on top, and multiple colored tokens on the different symbols of the board.

Into the Machine is a very efficient combination of racing game (you want to move your markers as fast as possible to the end) and worker placement (by making actions on a board where space is limited). Very very enjoyable, good iconography – it was a prototype so no copies to buy but it may be in next year’s list.

Skybridge

A central board with cards of different colors, a player board with resources and cards on top; a board representing a large bridge/tower being built.

Table demo only for Skybridge, a game where players try to build a bridge in the sky with the hell of various characters and gods. It did look interesting, but not enough to try to fight for a table on our last, shorter day.

Weave

A 4x4 grid with squared colored tiles and a bunch of gems on the tiles. The colors of the gems are the same as the one from the tiles, but they do not necessarily match where they are.

We played Weave at two players, and we suspect it’s best for two players – but it was very good at two players. You’re both playing on the same grid, trying to make alignments of gems on the correct color of tile with three actions: pick a gem, place a gem, flip a tile (to get another, known color). If you place a gem on a tile of the same color, you get an extra action depending on said color leading to fun combos. First player to three points (which happens when an action creates a line) wins the game. Very pleasant, and we got a copy (and I’ll update the BoardGameGeek link when it’s out of the processing queue 🙂 ).

Five Families

A map of New York split in different colorred areas, an impressive amount of money tokens, some cards and meeples.

In Five Families, players play mafia families trying to control boroughs of New York in the 1930s. They try to claim territory and, if they manage to transform their claim, control it, usually at the cost of people (canonically “injured”) and/or money. Areas are grouped into sets of threes on which majority of control is computed for extra points. I liked it a lot for the first half of the game, and then it felt like it was getting quite long. I suspect that we were not playing the game aggressively enough for it to quite work.

Kingdom Crossing

A board showing islands joined by bridges; player boards show variousresources. The bridges have little paw tokens on them, and there's a bunch of cards on in piles on the board. The design is very cute.

Kingdom Crossing was high on my list of games I wanted to look at this year, and it almost didn’t work out (but we found a table as the last thing we played this year!). There’s no way I’m going to resist “we took the 7 bridges of Königsberg and made a board game with that”. Add to that cute animals, a solid engine building mechanism and action selection, and you get a box I’m happy to have in my collection 🙂

Scavenger Hunt round 45

Published on 22 October 202522 October 2025 by BaliseLeave a comment

I’ve been a very avid participant to the Photography Scavenger Hunt in the past, but I had let a few rounds go by recently for reasons that are not entirely clear to me either. For this round, I decided to get back on the horse and to submit pictures; we went to Iceland this summer, and I mostly submitted shots from that trip, including some “found shots” shoehorned into the theme after the fact! We did have to submit a grid of pictures as a bonus as well, though, so I reframed/cropped all the pictures so that they could fit on said grid.

In the order of the reveals, here are the pictures I submitted. The headings have links to the albums of my fellow Scavengers.

Asphalt

Asphalt was not a found shot, I knew the word was on the list, and I hunted it down specifically. When we were near a geothermal plant on the sixth day of our trip, this road going upwards seemingly alone in that terrain caught my eye, and I took multiple shots of it. I liked this one best, with the large white vehicle in the foreground – we’ve seen a lot of these during our trip.

Bleak

Another one that was less “found shot” and more “I have bleak on my list, and this is actually pretty bleak.” That’s one of the recent lava fields near Grindavík, which we saw on the last day of our trip. Volcanoes are fascinating and terrifying, and Iceland is a constant reminder of that.

Black lava rock covering the vast majority of the image, with rugged texture. On top of the image there's a bit of grey menacing sky with clouds.

Ink

Well, that one is the only one that I did not shoot in Iceland; I came home, and I had nothing that I could make fit from that trip. So I got my tripod and light box out, a large water recipient, and some blue ink, and I made some ink patterns. It’s honestly quick and dirty for studio work, which makes it somewhat unsatisfying, but better a mid pic than no pic! 😀

Swirls of blue ink over a white background. The ink patterns looks a bit like jellyfish.

Goth

I was probably thinking more of “bleak” than of “goth” when I took this picture on our day 10 on the black sand beach, but I think it worked well for Goth as well. I would like to point out that this picture is NOT processed as black and white and that it is indeed color photography!

A very gloomy landscape with black sand in the foreground, grey sea (with very light hints of green), and in the background rocks protruding from the sea, barely visible despite their large size because of thick fog.

Ant

This one was part found shot and part not. I didn’t have the word in my mind at all when I took the picture (I was more interested in the geyser!) but I knew exactly what to use when I saw the word again – small faraway people looking like ants! And a lot of them too. This was on the last day of our trip.

A geyser eruption, probably a couple of dozens of meters high, next to a crowd of people who look tiny next to the water jet. The scene is photographed from far away; around the geyser there is red soil with low green vegetation and a few buildings.

Mystery

Mystery was absolutely a found shot. I had put that in “this is probably a Scavenger picture” when I sorted through my travel photos because the way the lava shows through the shadows makes it very difficult for me to see anything else than a fox with fiery eyes… but it’s “just” the way lava fell there. Also this was during the Lava show part of our visit on the 10th day.

A black and red dark picture showing glowing lava in a dark room. In the bottom right corner, the lava has two bright spots that look like eyes which sell the illusion of a fire fox hiding in the pattern.

Jet

Jet was pretty much a given: I’m travelling by plane, surely I’ll be able to snap a jet picture of some kind. Hence, I have a bit more plane picz than usual – and I really liked this one 🙂

The wing of an Icelandair airplane, seen above a landscape composed of a large dark green forest on the bottom left part of the picture and a multitude of colorful fields in the rest of the picture. A light blue lake is visible in the distance.

Elegant

Horses in Iceland are very photogenic, and I went through my horse pictures to find one for the theme. It was harder than I expected because the best horses didn’t necessarily work background-wise, but I eventually decided on this one.

A small brown horse with lighter hair, looking very well kept, with green fields and a few buildings in the background.

Shadow

Shadow was the hardest word of this Hunt for me, and I’m not very convinced with what I ended up submitting – this is the entrance of a small cave that we popped by almost by chance (tiny place, just a couple of interesting holes 🙂 ). But it definitely has a large shadow considering the lack of light!

A small dark cave below a rocky surface with a bit of grass. The entrance looks human-sized, the cave is almost completely dark, a small dirt track is leading to it.

Grid

The final word was Grid, as a bonus to show all your pictures in a single one. I would have much preferred having all Iceland pictures, but Ink and Jet are a bit the odds one out (for Jet I probably had alternatives if it had been the only odd one out). I had laid out my grid before I did the processing of the other pictures, because it constrained the ratios of my crops; I considered going for all squares, but I felt like the longer format worked better.

A 3x3 rectangular collage of all the previous pictures; from left to right and top to bottom Asphalt, Ants, Jet, Ink, Elegant, Shadow, Goth, Bleak and Mystery.

And there, another round done! We’ll see how the next one goes 🙂

Sabbatical report

Published on 30 September 2025 by BaliseLeave a comment

I’ve had the opportunity to take an 8-week sabbatical from work, and I took that opportunity this summer. Eight weeks feel both long and short – after a week, you’re more than 10% done! but then, you still have more than a month and a half off!

Overall, it was a great experience. It gave me time to travel to Pas-de-Calais in France, and to Iceland. Those two done, that was three weeks (both “already” and “only” 🙂 ).

A green see with a bit of sandy beach, some yellow plants in the foreground, a peninsula in the fog in the background. — A picture from the aforementioned Pas-de-Calais

And apart from that? Well, I enjoyed my free time. Processing the Iceland pictures did take a significant chunk of post-travel time, so there was that. I read a bit; I restarted reading The Expanse, I’m not done yet. I created an e-mail subscription to Serialit to read Notre Dame de Paris, and I’ve been reading that as well. I played videogames – including Expedition 33, which was also a large chunk of time.

I coded a bit – not that much – on some vague project that will potentially see the light of day maybe at some point – I currently envision it as a “to-be-read pile management clicker game”, but it has already changed shape two or three times since I started playing with the concept. It made me play with a bit of Typescript, some fancy CSS stuff, and handle a bunch of messy real-life data in the hope of being able to generate synthetic data (not with an LLM. Possibly somewhere in the realm of machine-learny-thing-stuff, but even that might be a stretch.)

I also spent some time preparing for Zug Day, to which we participated at the end of August – trying to get a maximum amount of points by going to various places in Switzerland, all by public transport. It was a lot of fun! (Also quite tiring 🙂 )

I handled a couple of chores, most notably filing the taxes – that was basically the first week (first year I’m doing that on my own in 15+ years – and the Swiss/Zürich tax form is no joke! And in German.)

I played some solo board games, an activity that I thoroughly enjoy but don’t necessary take the time to slow down for in my regular schedule. I still have a Welcome to the Moon campaign to continue, so that’s going to happen, and I’m grumpy at my Maglev Metro scores, so that will happen too, probably. The SPIEL fair in Essen is less than a month away; I might be on the lookout for stuff there too 😉

On the “gaming” side of things, I also made good progress with the amazing book that is The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, which is an utterly amazing puzzle book with a bunch of language puzzles. It’s a GREAT collection that tickles my brain in just the right way; I’ve finished a good 70% of it.

Being out of the usual schedule also gives an opportunity to evaluate, improve and fix one’s “systems” – I did manage to setup a todo-list system that actually seems to work (and that also apparently survived the “back to real-life schedule”) with Todoist, and I did some tweaking of my Obsidian setup – maybe I’ll talk a bit more about that at some point.

I wanted to work more on AlphabeticalZürich, and that kind of failed; part of that was traveling, part of that was “I fucked up my knee somehow and I’m currently supposed to be resting it”, which makes me a bit grumpy.

I have now been back at work for two weeks. The first week was a breeze, the second one hit me much harder. On the seventh week of my sabbatical, I was starting to look forward to being at work, although I was a bit anxious about catching up with two months of stuff happening. That, however, went surprisingly well – I’m still missing bits of context here and there, but overall it’s all good. But, I’ve long had issues with balancing the (objectively mistaken) impression that I’m not doing “enough” with long-term sustainability; I had made good progress in the past year, but I see old anxious patterns popping their head again as I’m back at work. Hopefully this will settle down as things go back to regular routine – and if not, well, I’ve done the work once, second time should be easier. I’m not too worried, and I’m still very happy to be back!

Overall, these 8 weeks were very (very) close to an unmitigated success: I’m happy I took that break, I’m now refreshed and happy that the break is over, and I think I learnt some sorely needed “taking-a-break-and-relaxing” skills 😉

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Published on 14 September 2025 by Balise1 Comment

A screenshot of a rendered Paris-inspired landscape, with the Eiffel Tower's top twisted towards the right and dark rocks floating in the sky — Source: media from Expedition 33 website

Today, I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Before I give a link to the game website, I need to say that I’ve been advised to get into the game without knowing anything about it, and that it was good advice. That said, at the risk of spoilers: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

The game has been recommended to me by at least two people who do not know each other, with the same kind of recommendation: a/ it’s amazing you have to play it b/ don’t read anything about it before playing, just get in there and enjoy. I’ll try, in this post, to keep the potential spoilers to a bare minimum; that said, if you want the pristine experience, you may want to stop reading here, go play the game, and see where you go from there :p

Continue reading →

Iceland photo processing and sharing

Published on 7 September 2025 by Balise3 Comments

There! I am done processing my pictures from Iceland.

For the quick version: I have a full set of ~250 pictures here: Iceland 2025, and a smaller “highlights” set of 36 pictures here: Iceland 2025 Highlights.

I have also sorted pictures by day (there’s nothing more in the “day” albums than in the large album), to go with the individual blog posts. I’ve added a link at the bottom of each post to the album; if you want “travel commentary” to go with the pictures, that’s probably the way to go! For reference:

I spent more time than usual thinking about the way to cull and process all these pictures; I had roughly 1500 DSLR pictures, to which I wanted to add a few of the pictures taken with phones (mostly selfies!) This definitely required a vaguely more thoughtful approach than “just get everything into a folder and sort and process my favorites”, as it would have felt like a very heavy process – divide and conquer for the win!

I first imported all the pictures on my hard drive and into Lightroom; that’s pretty much a given, and that took a non-trivial amount of time (I suspect my card reader may not be the fastest.) Then, I put everything into collections. I tend to use keywords rather than collections; I do remember that I had a rationale for putting things into collections rather than keywords, but I don’t remember what it was 😅 My collections were place-based, AND numbered. I heavily used the GPS coordinates stored by my camera to make sure that I was putting the right pictures in the right collection, and with that I arrived at 39 sets of pictures. Of these, I had four sets that were more than 80 pictures (with a max at 108), and the rest was below 60 pictures, which felt generally more manageable.

I started by getting a single “best-of” picture for each of these sets (a few of these didn’t make the cut already), and I processed these first. Worst case, I had a good set of 36 pictures – yay.

Then, I went through all sets individually, culling pictures that were identical to another one, or not necessarily representative, or just plainly bland. I typically did 2-3 passes on larger sets to get a tighter selection. Once that was done, processing/editing − that’s a fairly standard process, and I got better/faster at it with AlphabeticalZürich. I’m not necessarily *good* at it objectively (I possibly edit too dark and/or too saturated), but it yields images that I like, which is the most important thing.

Finally, I uploaded pictures to “day” albums as I went through them. After processing a full day, I went back to the phone pictures, I added selfies and other phone pictures that required an addition to the album, and I continued to the next set. I also added all the pictures of the “day album” to the global album.

And that’s pretty much it!

Let me add a picture to this blog post so that I have a thumbnail when I share it:

Brown and red mountains, with a clearly visible ridge/path in the middle; in the foreground, dark lava stones and some moss. — Landmannalaugar

Iceland – Day 12

Published on 25 August 20257 September 2025 by Balise2 Comments

Today is our last day, as we’re flying home at stupid’o’clock tomorrow morning. Hence, we travelled to our next hotel, which is very (very) close to the airport.

Instead of taking the most direct route, and stopping on a few stops along the way, we opted to go back to a couple favorites from 9 years ago. First stop, Geysir, which has, well, geysers. A few bubbly ones, a few dormant ones, some steam vents, and the current star of the show, Strokkur, which erupts every few minutes. We saw it multiple times during the time we were there, and as we were leaving, I went to try to get a video. I had a perfect spot with nobody in front of me… maaaaybe for a reason.

We ended up pretty soaked, to the point that we changed t-shirts and sweaters when coming back to the car! Maybe not our finest moment, but it was hilarious, and not everyone can say they’ve had a geyser shower.

After Geysir, we went to Þingvellir, which is both the place where the northern american and European tectonic plates meet (in first approximation, if I remember correctly it’s a bit more complicated than that) and the place where the parliament of Iceland met from 930 to 1798 (according to Wikipedia). And that place gives me literal goosebumps (in a good way).

A gravel path next to a vertical stone wall/structure

We walked along the path and it was nice and an easy path; lots of people, though (it is one of the very popular sites, very close to Reykjavik – nothing surprising there).

On our way to Keflavik, we decided to make a detour to approach Keflavik from the south, and to pass through the “new” lava field from 2024 next to the Blue Lagoon (we had checked earlier in the day that there was no warning or closure around the area and that it looked safe to do).

The lava field is impressive; all the other ones we’ve seen during the trip were covered with moss or other vegetation, this one is *raw* (and still smoking in some points).

A black lava field behind a dark gravel barrier, with a mountain in the background

We drove next to Grindavík, which is currently evacuated (and, I presume, consequently completely uninhabited), which was eerie and very sad.

Our last stop for the day and for the trip was the Reykjanes lighthouse, next to an impressive geothermal energy facility. The wind and state of the stairs (and general fatigue) made us renounce going up the lighthouse itself, but it was still a cool view point.

And there, we’re currently 3km away from the airport, the alarm-clocks are set to 4.30, and tomorrow we go home (and start sorting through ALL THE PICTURES).

The photo album for this day is here: Iceland – 2025-08-25.

Iceland – Day 11

Published on 24 August 20257 September 2025 by Balise1 Comment

Our plan for today was very specific and involved bus tickets booked at the same time as the whole trip. We took a bus to Landmannalaugar, a place we had visited 9 years ago under similar circumstances and were both eager to revisit.

We were a bit nervous yesterday when looking at the weather forecast; but evidently, we can’t read a weather forecast, as we were planning for the worst and had something very close to a perfect weather!

We left our apartment around 7:30; we had a 30-minute drive to the bus pick-up, and we wanted to grab breakfast and something for lunch before that too. We did all that, the bus arrived early, we boarded the bus, and onwards we were!

The main reason for taking a bus there is that the road is *brutal*. Not in terms of distance – Hella (where we took the bus) to the base station is a hundred kilometers. It’s also 2h45 by bus. The first 50km are not a problem. The last 50 are a track road that is unpassable unless you drive a 4-wheel-drive vehicle, and some argue you need a non-trivial one too (at the very least there’s a couple of streams to cross, and depending where you park a larger river). So that’s definitely not something we’d feel comfortable doing, even if we had rented such a vehicle – so bus it is!

The road is very bumpy but also very beautiful. We finally arrived at the base station (there’s a large camping area and it’s a large Serious Hiking Trail start point), looked at the maps, decided for the hike we wanted and had time to do, and off we went. We did end up doing a very similar trail to the one we did 9 years ago; we were both thinking that being willing to sit almost 6h on a bus (3h in each direction) to redo a hike that we had already done said something about how special that place is.

It is literally one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever had the privilege to visit – and I live in Switzerland. The only reason why I’m not saying “the most beautiful place” is because I did go to Grand Canyon as a kid, and it might come first. (Would need to check.)

Pictures (especially phone pictures that I haven’t processed myself) won’t give a good idea of the magnificence of that place, but have a few, still.

Colorful (brown/green/orange/yellow) mountains with a flat meadow and a few sheep in front of them

A red/rust-colored mountain, with the legs of a person eating a sandwich in the foreground, and lava pieces in the middle ground — Lunch break!

A black, green and rust mountain with parts of a lava field (dark irregular rock pieces) in the foreground

We considered trying to go a bit higher on this hike, there was a path to a lower summit, but looking at the path going up, knowing the path going down was steeper, and having a strict deadline for the bus home made us decide to not do that. It was the right move: the lava field after that was plenty challenging enough, and it would have been difficult for me after that extra part. We still did go to almost the foot of the path in question before giving up and going back to our main path.

After the hike, we were an hour early before the bus would start; we walked around a bit to the thermal source nearby where people were enjoying the hot water, and we flomped back in the bus at the first occasion.

And, just for completion, a couple of pictures from the road back, taken from the bus window!

View from a bus window. The bus is crossing a wide river. In the background, light brown and green mountains, very pretty. — Yes, that’s our bus crossing the water

View from a bus window. Crossing another bus, on a narrow road that has no paving and no gravel - a track, really. — Now that’s our bus crossing another bus. Unclear which is more challenging, honestly.

Some green and black mountains with pleasing curvy patterns, and a small stream of water in the foreground — But the landscape is pretty.

A herd of horses walking between an asphalted road and a green field — And we saw horses!

After the bus left us where we had left our car, we went for dinner (Midgard, great place), and drove home where we were back in the gloomy and windy weather. And both: tired 🙂

The photo album for this day is here: Iceland – 2025-08-24.

Iceland – Day 10

Published on 23 August 20257 September 2025 by Balise2 Comments

The theme of the day was probably “lava”! We started the day under, let’s say, challenging weather conditions (light rain, significant wind, gloomy atmosphere), so we were quite happy to start the day with an indoor activity, namely the Lava Show in Vík. Their spiel is “you get to see real lava!” and, indeed, you do. It’s a 1h show with an introduction, a small movie about volcano eruptions in general and Katla in particular, and then we get to the core of the show: they pour melting lava in the room, and demonstrate how it cools down. Is it gimmicky? Absolutely. Is it very cool? Well, not really because lava is really hot, but y’know, conceptually, yes, it’s very cool.

A dark room with a very bright liquid light in the middle and a man standing next to lava

We also got to see the furnace where they melt the lava, which was also pretty neat. Overall, the general memory is that my cheeks still feel kind of flushed from the heat! (They’re probably not. The memory is there.)

After the show, the weather was still gloomy; we still made way to the “more dangerous” black sand beach.

A display with three lights of three colors (red, yellow, green) on top, and indications on whether the beach is safe. The yellow light is lit, meaning that one should stay within a specific area of the beach.

That beach is known for very dangerous waves, and there’s been a few accidents recently. There’s a set of lights that indicates where it should be safe to go, and here it was okay to go at the beginning of the beach (there was a map with the area to avoid), so we did that.

There’s actually less sand and more pebbles than on the other side of the mountain, but the waves are indeed more impressive (although we didn’t see anything awe-inspiring – probably for the best!). And we saw more puffins!

We do expect to have significant weather tomorrow, so our plan was to go to the Lava Center a bit after our next hotel (our planned road was much smaller today) and not get tired of the weather just yet. But there was a neat waterfall on the way, so we stopped, and the weather was significantly better by then, so we hiked 😛 The hike started with a 500-step stair (ow), but apart from that it was reasonable. And we did get not one, not two, but three waterfalls for the price of one!

A selfie of a man and a woman smiling awkwardly in front of a waterfall

We still made plans with the objective of being able to visit the Lava Centre in Hvolsvöllur, and we did manage to do that. It’s a small but well-made museum on the various ways Iceland tends to emit ash and lava; I missed a bit of more technical information on actual lava rather than volcanoes, but it was still a nice visit. There was also a series of video interviews from people who got recently evacuated from Grindavík after the recent eruptions, and it was moving.

After the museum, we had a bit of time to kill before our restaurant reservation. We ended up popping by Efra-Hvolshellar, a place where there’s a few old (settlement time or earlier, apparently) man-made caves. It was kind of creepy-weird, but it was fun to see.

A dark tunnel dug into rocks, with the end of the tunnel providing the only light

Finally, we went for dinner and went back to our lodging (this night and the next we’re in a kind of studio in a group of cabins, and there’s no restaurant there). We ended the day by preparing the bags for tomorrow: we’re going to Landmannalaugar (where we kind of expect challenging weather), by bus because the road to there is not one we can drive on (especially with the car we rented!).

Oh, and today I finished my first 64G memory card in my camera. Good thing I had planned for that eventuality. Future me is wincing at the idea of sorting all this 🙂

The photo album for this day is here: Iceland – 2025-08-23.

Iceland – Day 9

Published on 22 August 20257 September 2025 by Balise1 Comment

Today’s highlight was, without hesitation: we saw icebergs!

A lake with some ice-blue icebergs and some white ones, and a glacier in the background

We went to a place called “Diamond Beach” – some pieces of the glacier occasionally fall in the nearby lake (the picture above), follow a path to the sea, and sometimes end their trip on the beach, where they’re quite impressive (and, depending on the type of ice and the light, definitely diamond reminiscent).

This place gave me a lot of feelings – yes, it’s stunning, but it’s also quite depressing when one thinks about it, and with that comes the guilt associated with being part of the problem, as a tourist. Still, I’m very grateful that I got to see this, and hey, I’ve seen icebergs, I didn’t even know it was on my bucket list 🙂

Our next step was a bit further down that road, in Fjallsárlón – another place with icebergs, but with a better view of the glacier. Very cool, and far less crowded, which I appreciated.

Then, we drove to Skaftafell, where we wanted to go for a small hike. We pondered two options, a shorter and easier one, and a slightly longer and with more ascent; the latter won due to promising a waterfall (I’m weak.) The hike was pleasant, but less so than yesterday’s, possibly due to the larger amount of people around (and/or existing fatigue). It was still very nice, and the waterfall at the end was pretty and had cool basalt columns behind it. After the hike, we were both hungry, so we shared a fish&chips at the camping site – it was surprisingly good!

As our last step of the day, we popped a head at the “non-dangerous black sand beach” (the one on the other side of the mountain apparently has genuinely dangerous waves). I was tired and I was cold, but I still really liked the beach and the rock structures behind it.

The shore of a black sand beach, with a wave rolling in the foreground. In the background, some rocks, including a structure of 3 pointy rock formations. The picture is dark and moody.

We had dinner at the hotel, where both the food and drinks were great, and that’s it for today! There’s exactly 0 chance of northern lights tonight considering the clouds. For tomorrow, we have tickets to the “Lava Show” here in Vík, we’ll get to see real hot lava made for the show 🙂

The photo album for this day is here: Iceland – 2025-08-22.

Iceland – Day 8

Published on 21 August 20257 September 2025 by Balise1 Comment

We woke up early this morning, and Pierre went for a run. So I was first under the shower and: achievement unlocked, first egg shower of the trip! We had strong memories of hot water really smelling like sulphur on our first trip, but we hadn’t experienced it yet on this one – this is now fixed 😀

Our first hesitation of the day was pondering whether we wanted to go to Hengifoss, which seemed to be a beautiful waterfall, but slightly out of our way. Additionally, some of the comments on Google Maps made me fear that the hike would be beyond my abilities. But I was reasonably rested, the waterfall did look very pretty (and high), it was still quite early in the day – so we decided to go.

I was fairly reassured when we arrived at the parking lot at the bottom of the hike: it looked FEASIBLE. Not easy, but feasible. And indeed, the ascent didn’t pose much of a problem – slow and steady wins the hike, etc etc. And the waterfall was splendid.

A waterfall between two 45° slopes, in front of a striped black and red stone wall

Going down was somewhat more challenging (I’m not very good at uphill, but I’m very bad at downhill), but we still managed with ALMOST NO DRAMA and overall it was a great hike.

We got a piece of cake and a coffee at the café next to the parking lot as a reward (and, most of all, as an essential break) before deciding what to do next.

Our next candidate (and next hesitation) was Petra’s Stone Collection. We were both very interested, but it did require going back all the way to our starting point, rather than being able to catch another more direct road south. We finally decided to do that, and am I glad we did.

It’s the private collection of a woman, Petra Sveinsdóttir, who collected stones during her whole life and displayed them in her home and garden. She passed away in 2012, but the museum lives as a family endeavour, and the whole thing brought me so much joy to see – such a labor of passion and love is to be commended. And obviously the collection itself is both impressive and has stunning pieces.

This is just a small corner of a part of the whole exhibition (and we have Pierre hiding in the middle of… pierres 🙂 ) (yeah that one only works in French) (he’s also been called a rock star, so that works). Anyway, I’m so happy that I got to see this place, which felt really special.

For the rest of the day, we mostly drove down the coast, enjoying the wonderful landscapes – this coast line is incredible. It did help that we had great weather, but still.

We did a last stop at the lighthouse in Hvalnes, which has a very nice view over the sea and the surrounding mountains too.

And we arrived tonight at our hotel, which has a clear view over Vatnajökull, the glacier which is the largest ice cap in Iceland (it covers roughly 10% of the country!). We had dinner, a sunset stroll around the hotel, and had a drink at the hotel bar, which had a good view over the nearby mountains and said glacier.

Little hope of northern lights tonight, the cloud layer that’s been absent for a large part of the day spawned around sunset time…

The photo album for this day is here: Iceland – 2025-08-21.

	Charles DW on SPIEL 2025 in Essen
	yoonathan on SPIEL 2025 in Essen
	James on SPIEL 2025 in Essen
	Alexandre Franke on SPIEL 2025 in Essen
	James on Scavenger Hunt round 45