Celebrate the holiday season with me and a board game! Let's solve Day 17 of the EXIT Advent Calendar together. This is not sponsored but thanks Kosmos for sending me the game to play!
See y'all tomorrow for DAY 18
Celebrate the holiday season with me and a board game! Let's solve Day 16 of the EXIT Advent Calendar together. This is not sponsored but thanks Kosmos for sending me the game to play!
See y'all tomorrow for DAY 17
Board games are fun to play, but did you also know you could turn a profit through 7 easy steps? Follow this satirical guide to make some real cash, and maybe even run a company of your own one day! Works for Ameritrash OR Euro games, FFG is best.
Games mentioned: Battlestar Galactica, Campaign for North Africa, Tigris and Euphrates, Star Wars: Queens’ Gambit, Twilight Imperium, Thunder’s Edge, Prophecy of Kings, Grimcoven, Catacombs, Winds of Numa Sera, Brass Birmingham, Nemesis: Retaliation, Monopoly, Taboo, Catan, Cosmic Encounter, Sid Meier’s Civilization (2010), Descent, Mansions of Madness, Throw Throw Burrito
COPYRIGHT - Any use of copyrighted content on this channel constitutes fair use pursuant to 17 U.S. Code § 107 as it is utilized for the purpose of criticism, comment, or news reporting allowed under that statute. See, e.g., Monster Communications, Inc. v. Turner Broadcasting Sys. Inc., 935 F.Supp. 490 (S.D. N.Y., 1996); SOFA Entertainment, Inc. v. Dodger Productions, Inc., No. 2:08-cv-02616 (9th Cir. Mar. 11, 2013); Equals Three, LLC v. Jukin Media, Inc., 14-09041 (C.D. Cal. Oct. 13, 2015).
PLEASE NOTE: I AM NOT A JOURNALIST. Nor am I a scholar providing academic-level peer-reviewed journal articles in video form. These videos are news commentary. I have made every attempt to cite my sources in this description.
This video is for entertainment and educational purposes only.
In Take Time, you and your team are placing numbered cards around a six-segment clock, trying to keep the totals climbing without going over 24—all while obeying weird scenario rules and not talking during the crucial placement phase. You’ll discuss a plan, go silent, place cards, then reveal everything and see whether your beautiful strategy survived contact with reality.
In this review, I walk through how Take Time works, what makes the 40-scenario campaign feel so compelling, and why the “talk, then silence, then reveal” structure creates some of the most tense cooperative moments I’ve had in a puzzle game.
If you enjoy cooperative puzzles, quiet tension, and those “we were SO CLOSE!” table groans, Take Time might be one to add to your list.
00:00 Intro
00:24 Complexity & Play Count
01:20 How It Plays
07:26 Skills
10:09 Final Thoughts
17:15 contact & Socials
Game Designer Adam Porter (Emberheart, Pikoko, Kompromat, Flip Pick Towers) discusses the year 2025 - his favourite games (including a heavily compromised Top 10), a designer that impressed him, achievements in game design and YouTube, and a wish list for the coming year.
'Adam in Wales: Legacy' is available worldwide, via Amazon's print on demand service, and as an ebook.
Use the links below, or IF NOT LISTED BELOW, search on your local Amazon for Adam in Wales: Legacy.
For five thousand years, people have gathered together to play games. Each of those games has something to teach us; not just about rules, mechanisms, and themes, but also about the business of games, publishing, and achieving lasting success.
Award-winning designer Adam Porter explores the 100 most influential tabletop games in history, from timeless classics like Chess, Go, and Mancala, through mass-market icons such as Monopoly, Connect 4, and The Game of Life, to modern strategy hits like Terraforming Mars, Gloomhaven, and Wingspan.
Each chapter examines a landmark title, uncovering the design choices behind its impact and the lessons today’s creators can draw from it. Whether you’re a designer, player, or student of game design, this book offers inspiration, insight, and actionable advice, derived from the games that shaped the hobby.
About the author
Adam Porter is an award winning game designer from the United Kingdom, known for making accessible games suitable for families, and for his popular YouTube channel Adam in Wales where Adam talks candidly about his experiences pitching and licensing games to publishers. Many new designers have looked to Adam for guidance when taking their first steps in the board game industry. Adam's published games include Pikoko, Doodle Rush, Kompromat, Qwuzzle, Zooligans, Thrown, Big Bazar, Happy Hoppers, Ballot Battle, and Zing-a-Zam.
Adam's four previous books are available from Amazon worldwide.
- Adam in Wales: Board Game Designer Journal
- Adam in Wales: Playtesting
- Adam in Wales: Product Design
- Adam in Wales: Getting Published as a Board Game Designer
0:00 Introduction
2:03 Top 10 of the past 5 years
5:23 Designer Spotlight
6:30 Game Design Update
11:09 Youtube Round-up
13:25 Top 10 Board Games of 2025
29:19 2026 Wishlist
This 6min video barely deserves timestamps, so I'm just going to leave the description as this - I love this new daily puzzle by Playte. It's giving mindfulness 2026.
The rise and fall of civilisations can be seen in Philippe Keyaerts's board games Vinci (1999 Descartes) and Small World (2009 Days of Wonder). They differ in important ways. Let's take a look!
Board Gems highlights older board and card games that are still great games today, and deserve to not be forgotten!
Can you build a mystery shape out of LEGO bricks… using only your teammate’s words? In Brick Like This!, one player describes, one player builds, and everyone races to shout “DONE!” before their opponents.
In this short, you’ll see how fast this game turns from “easy party game” into pure real-time LEGO panic, with teams scrambling to stack bricks, follow the rules, and actually recognize what they just built.
Twilight's Fall features the same great space opera gameplay, just with asymmetry vastly changed! Now players will draft their technologies/faction specialties throughout the game. And you can use the Prophecy of Kings mech abilities of multiple factions! The galactic ameritrash conquest still stays with strategy cards and area control. You'll still do King of the Hill with holding Mecatol Rex. However the tech tree is removed, where you activate splices to draft all sorts of cards! Is this more or less Euro friendly now? Does this reward veteran Twilight Imperium players after countless matches of direct conflict?
Table of Contents:
Overview - (0:00)
What is Twilight's Fall - (0:52)
Pros - (4:27)
Cons - (15:55)
Recommender Score - (18:31)
Alexander's Personal Score - (23:31)
Ashton's Personal Score - (23:48)
In this interview, I speak with Adrien Martinot, co-designer of Star Wars: Battle of Hoth alongside Richard Borg. We discuss his journey from leading the Days of Wonder studio to becoming a board game designer, his long-standing passion for Memoir ’44, and how he collaborated with Richard Borg to bring this new Command and Colors adaptation to life.
Star Wars: Battle of Hoth is a fast-paced miniatures wargame set on the iconic ice planet from The Empire Strikes Back. Built on the Command and Colors system, it offers seventeen scenarios, optional leader cards featuring six classic Star Wars characters, and two branching campaigns where each battle shapes the next.
If you want to learn more about the design process behind this game and Adrien’s insights into the board game industry, this conversation is for you.
I’ve been chasing Nokosu Dice for years—and it finally hit the table. This clever trick-taking game blends cards and dice in a way that feels instantly familiar, then hits you with a delicious twist: you’re not just trying to win tricks… you’re trying to win the right number of tricks, but your bid might change as the round progresses. In this review, I’ll explain how it plays, what makes it special, and whether this long-time grail game was actually worth the hype.
If you love trick-taking games, quirky Japanese designs, and tense “just one more point” decisions, Nokosu Dice is a fascinating little gem.
00:00 Intro
00:28 Play Count & Complexity
00:43 Victory Conditions & How It Plays
05:20 Skills
07:27 Final Thoughts
13:07 Contact & Socials
THE GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED. THANK YOU FOR WATCHING AND COMMENTING.
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Add floors to your towers, finish them off with roofs, then add them onto the board for area-majority goodness. Wait, build the tower and THEN choose where it goes? Oh, never mind the odd order; we can keep tabs on each other's work-in-progress and try to plan around where we might compete. Escalating points, and brutal scoring in which only the top two score (and sometimes not even that), make for a four-player game with the tension ratcheted up to 11.
Alan Moon's and Aaron Weissblum's Capitol (Schmidt 2001) was once a Top 150 board game that didn't have an English edition — until Skyline 3000 (Z-Man 2009), which sadly exited the hobby zeitgeist almost as soon as it entered. It's games like this that are the reason I created this channel — to help people remember what great games these were.
00:00 Intro ▶️
03:01 How to Play 🎲
18:55 Is It a Gem? 💎
Board Gems highlights older board and card games that are still great games today, and deserve to not be forgotten!
Tag Team is a fast, feisty 2-player dueling game from Le Scorpion Masqué that mashes up deckbuilding with an auto-battler twist: you never shuffle your Fight Deck. Instead, you draft cards and slot them into exact positions, trying to engineer the perfect sequence while your tag-team fighters trade blows automatically. In this review, I’ll cover how it plays, what makes the no-shuffle system so clever, who it’s best for, and the skills it flexes at the table.
If you’ve been looking for a quick head-to-head game with big “Aha!” moments, sneaky timing, and satisfying counterplay, Tag Team brings the chaos in about 15 minutes.
00:00 Intro
00:23 Play Count & Complexity
00:38 Victory Conditions & How It’s Played
05:10 Skills
06:45 Final Thoughts
13:32 Contact & Socials
Game Designer Adam Porter (Emberheart, Pikoko, Kompromat, Flip Pick Towers) guides us through 5000 years of board game design, and offers his views on where the industry is heading.
'Adam in Wales: Legacy' is available worldwide, via Amazon's print on demand service, and as an ebook.
Use the links below, or IF NOT LISTED BELOW, search on your local Amazon for Adam in Wales: Legacy.
For five thousand years, people have gathered together to play games. Each of those games has something to teach us; not just about rules, mechanisms, and themes, but also about the business of games, publishing, and achieving lasting success.
Award-winning designer Adam Porter explores the 100 most influential tabletop games in history, from timeless classics like Chess, Go, and Mancala, through mass-market icons such as Monopoly, Connect 4, and The Game of Life, to modern strategy hits like Terraforming Mars, Gloomhaven, and Wingspan.
Each chapter examines a landmark title, uncovering the design choices behind its impact and the lessons today’s creators can draw from it. Whether you’re a designer, player, or student of game design, this book offers inspiration, insight, and actionable advice, derived from the games that shaped the hobby.
About the author
Adam Porter is an award winning game designer from the United Kingdom, known for making accessible games suitable for families, and for his popular YouTube channel Adam in Wales where Adam talks candidly about his experiences pitching and licensing games to publishers. Many new designers have looked to Adam for guidance when taking their first steps in the board game industry. Adam's published games include Pikoko, Doodle Rush, Kompromat, Qwuzzle, Zooligans, Thrown, Big Bazar, Happy Hoppers, Ballot Battle, and Zing-a-Zam.
Adam's four previous books are available from Amazon worldwide.
- Adam in Wales: Board Game Designer Journal
- Adam in Wales: Playtesting
- Adam in Wales: Product Design
- Adam in Wales: Getting Published as a Board Game Designer
0:00 Introduction
2:20 Types of Designers
2:39 Ancient Era
5:00 Medieval Era
7:32 Early Modern Games
8:03 Kriegsspiel
9:45 The Mass Market
16:32 Hobby Games
17:40 German Games
19:05 Avalon Hill
19:38 Dungeons and Dragons
20:22 Games Workshop
22:10 Internet & Video Games
25:05 Fantasy Flight Games
26:08 Board Game Geek
26:43 YouTube Channels
27:32 Kickstarter
28:33 Asmodee
31:32 The Present
32:45 A Saturated Market
33:36 The Video Game Crash
35:24 The Comic Book Bubble
36:40 A Sustainable Future
We're back after a quick 1 week trip to Tokyo for Tokyo Game Market Autumn / Fall 2025. We were able to pick up every game on our most anticipated list, as well as close to 40 extras that were not on that list. 😅 Turns out that researching the games only makes you discover more that you want!
This is our fifth trip to Tokyo Game Market. Check out our other videos for more tips and tricks if you're visiting Japan for this amazing convention.
As always, let us know in the comments which games you're most intrigued about!
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction (time in Japan)
00:47 - Arclight
01:33 - Gamers from everywhere!
02:28 - Most anticipated games of TGM
15:15 - Most anticipated games of Essen
17:23 - Planned purchases
36:37 - Impulse purchases
47:27 - Review copies / gifts
54:26 - More shopping in Tokyo
Thanks for stopping by! We're Amy & Maggie aka ThinkerThemer. We're an Australian couple with two very different perspectives of what makes a great board game - Amy (Thinker) is all about the mechanics and enjoys tight, competitive games, and Maggie (Themer) is all about the storytelling and the theme of the game, and the 'world' that the designer is trying to create. Subscribe to our channel to hear us talk about these two elements of a game, and how well integrated we feel these are in delivering a cohesive and wonderful game experience.
#boardgames #tabletopgames #thinkerthemer #ゲームマーケット秋2025 ❤🏳️🌈🇦🇺
In this video, I sit down with designer Paolo Mori to play through the Quatre Bras scenario from Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars, his new Napoleonic wargame system co-designed with Alessandro Zucchini. We walk through the rules, tactics, and historical considerations behind this fast, elegant system while trying to determine whether Wellington can hold the line against Ney’s assault.
This stream is also a chance to discuss Paolo’s design intentions, how the system evolved, and why he believes Battlefields can appeal both to experienced grognards and newcomers.
A review copy of the game was kindly provided by Paolo.
If you enjoy this type of content, consider supporting the channel on Ko-fi — it keeps the show independent and ad-free, and grants access to the Homo Ludens Discord:
👉 https://ko-fi.com/homoludens1871
Timecode:
00:00 Intro
03:40 Play
01:09:14 Debrief Chat