If you've followed me for any time, especially on our Discord server, you've heard me talk about a couple things: my appreciation for the "new" podcast Board Game Hot Takes, and my observations of how the energy of our hobby has shifted from when I joined it. I get to combine both of those topics into one episode by inviting one of the three BGHT hosts, Tim, to join me on the mic and use him as a representative of the "next generation" of boardgame hobbyists. He chuckles at that characterization, pointing out he's not that much younger than me, and has been playing boardgames for a few years. But that still makes him the New Kid on the Block compared to an old fart like me, and I think it shows in the types of games he & I both love.
That's what we talk about, how the bulk of the hobby may be broadening and unchanging (think about Ticket To Ride, Catan, and Azul at Target stores and on Amazon), but the energetic, active hobbyist part of the hobby appears to be compelled by crowdfunding, plastic figures, and the BGG Top/Hot games lists. I'm not trying to say that's a problem, but I am certain that's it's a difference. At the same time, there are some nice advantages for old-timers like me, whether it's improved game distribution, production enhancements (e.g. double-layer boards), and the most robust online multiplayer options we've ever seen. -Mark
Openers: Voyages Closers: Virtual Flea Markets (VFMs) at game conventions and other events
It'll be no surprise to any listener that I care about the Spiel des Jahres. In addition to its decades-long strong & beneficial effect on our boardgaming hobby, these awards are a better predictor for me than any other. Predictor of what? Of the games I'll actually continue to own and play with family & friends. True, they skew more toward lighter games, but that's ok with family. And truthfully, that's the preference of myself and several of my longtime gaming friends, too. If you only know the SdJ from recent years when it homed-in on the lightest games, more about parties than strategy, then I'd forgive your feeling that these aren't an award process that means much to a hobbyist. I'm thinking of recent winners like Just One, Pictures, MicroMacro Crime City, and even Dorfromantik. However, while you may long for the days when the award was bestowed on more gamer-ish titles like Tikal, Torres, and El Grande, my own personal highlights are the titles in between those two groupings. I'm thinking of Catan, Thurn und Taxis, Carcassonne, Dominion, Hanabi, Dominion, Ticket to Ride, or Alhambra. Not only the winners, too--I've learned to pay attention to the other nominees and recommended list of games, too. Just last weekend my friends Davebo and Jeff were visiting. Along with some other local gamers we played a lot of great titles, but guess what was on the table, pulled from my collection: Luxor and Imhotep, two fantastic nominees that were merely overshadowed by the steamroller winners those years (Azul and Codenames, respectively). The titles nominated for Spiel des Jahres are Captain Flip, In the Footsteps of Darwin, and Sky Team. In addition to these nominations, the SdJ jury recommended the following six titles: Harmonies, Passt nicht!, Phantom Ink, Schätz it if you can, Trekking Through History, and Trio.
I think it's July 21 when we'll hear which games are the ultimate winners, but do take a look at the other nominees and recommended games. There's a good chance you'll enjoy those games, too, maybe even more than the winner. -Mark
Recently I asked my listeners for more feedback about this old podcast. What I heard back was very encouraging--thanks for that. Most of you just tell me to keep doing what I like & want. Good, I will! Some other comments called back to the All About… episodes I used to do, deep dives into individual games. Others remembered the 100 Great Games series fondly, a collaboration I did with Mark Jackson and Stephen Glenn. More ideas came up, too. I've mulled those over and devised something that should be fun for me and worthwhile for the listeners. I've invited an old friend to join me in discussions about the Spiel des Jahres winner from a particular year. That makes it kind of a deeper dive into that title, but we also talk about the other nominees from that year. Not only that, but the longer list of recommended games, too. Along the way, we briefly mention the winners of the Kennerspiel, Deutscher Spielepreis, and the À La Carte, all notable awards in Germany where the Spiel des Jahres is still the preeminent award for our hobby.
When this podcast is released, we'll be only a week away from hearing the list of nominees and recommended games for this award year, 2024. I'll be very interested in that, however this new, occasional podcast series is about the SdJ in prior years. The award itself goes back to 1979--and I may cover those oldies someday--but for this episode I'm starting with something much closer to our present time. Five years ago seems like a good place to start--recent enough that the games are familiar, but distant enough that most gamers will have had plenty of opportunity to play them, if desired. Future episodes may jump around to other years that interest me, like a goofy time machine. My co-host for this episode is Mark Jackson, a well-known writer about boardgames. He's had multiple websites, is active on social media, is part of the Opinionated Gamers editorial board, a member of the International Gamers Awards panel, and has been on my podcast several times. I'm happy to call him my friend, too. Really, the only downside to this guy is the confusion we generate with our similar identities.
Mark & I have similar histories, but not always the same taste in games. Nonetheless, I know I can count on him to appreciate the kind of family strategy boardgames I focus on in this podcast--it's in the opening to every episode! That's what the Spiel des Jahres awards and selection jury are all about, too. It's a great fit.
By setting our Spiel des Jahres Wayback Machine to 2019, Sherman & Peabody Mark & Mark will be going back to when Just One took home the prize over fellow nominees Werewords and L.L.A.M.A. Do you know all of those? How about the list of recommended titles, Belratti, Dizzle, Krass Kacke/Who Did It?, Reef, and Sherlock? We do our best to talk about all of those, while also mentioning that Wingspan won the Kennerspiel & DSP, while Belratti won the À La Carte. Let us know what you think about these games, and the SdJ Wayback Machine itself. Is there a particular year you want us to visit next? With 44 more years to choose from, we're not going hit them all or go in any order. Future episodes will be occasionally interspersed with the "regular" episodes of Boardgames To Go. Very soon we'll have this year's nominees to discuss on our Discord server or elsewhere. I'm looking forward to all of it. -Mark
In my last episode's Closer I asked for feedback. Really, all podcasters ask for feedback in every episode. I'm no different. Well, I'm only different in that I've been podcasting forever, and many of my listeners have given me feedback over the years. Other than comments on Discord, however, it had been some time since I received much feedback, which is why I asked for it specifically. And if you'll indulge me, this episode's second half is all about that feedback, and my responses to it.
Before I get to that, however, I talk about a bunch of games played recently. I used to do this, what I called my "Session Report (SR) & Feedback" episodes. However, it's been a while since I published that kind of episode. How long? A decade! By my records, the last time was exactly 10 years ago, in episode 146 from the May 2014. Seems ok to do another. Closer: If it's been 10 years since my last "SR & Feedback" episode, what other old features of this podcast do you recall? Are there any I've forgotten? -Mark
Closer: A specific call for feedback to the podcast. Tell me what you like me to do more of, or do less. Session Report & Feedback episodes, like the old days? All About shows (more old days)? Something else? Over the years I've been to many game conventions, both big & small. However, it wasn't until this past month that I attended a Dice Tower event. The Dice Tower West annual game convention is held in the west, in Las Vegas, which means it's a pretty easy drive for me - four hours across the southwest. Though I'm not really a Vegas kind of guy, this is still a big geek convention of boardgamers, right? Right. In that, it felt very familiar to the multiple times I've visited BGGcon in Dallas...just in a different city, hosted by a different organization. I knew some of my buddies had attended in prior years, and many months I started asking them if they'd attend in 2024. I think most of us were on the fence, but hearing other friends may attend helped collectively push most of us into signing up. A couple had to back out due to unexpected life commitments, but enough of my gang went that we were able to fill game tables the whole time. In this episode, I talk about ALL of the games I played during this Wednesday-Sunday major event. Half of that discussion is about old games, or OG games, or whatever you want to call them. How old? We decided the cutoff should be a quarter-century. Focusing one of our convention days on titles at least 25 years old meant we had a full Friday of pre-2000 games. Games from the last century...the last millennium! Practically speaking, we played games from the 1990s, which is when many of our group got into modern boardgaming, including yours truly. If you appreciate retro gaming like we do, you'll love the first half of the episode. If not, skip ahead to the interlude music break near the 55-minute mark, and then I transition into some newer titles. That represented the other half of what I played at the convention. Including lots of card games, which are having their moment in the sun right now. Wonderful! (Even though I didn't love all of the card games I played, as you'll hear, I love that we're playing so many of them again.) -Mark
Last year I ran my first "March Madness" style, 64-game, single-elimination vote, with a contest to submit predictions for the entire bracket. If you've got a pool for the famous college basketball tournament in your office, or with your friends, then you know what this is. Actually, these days many other copycat tournament prediction contests exists--there's a big one on BoardGameGeek, my favorite movie podcast (Filmspotting) does one for films, and so on. My version is similar, but it lists a bunch of games to be voted on against each other. Listeners suggested I call it Mark Madness, and that's what we did. Last year I picked all 64 games that we voted on, pulling from recent award winners in different categories. Listener Patrick Pence ended up the winner of the contest, and for that reason he's my co-host this month for the 2024 Mark Madness. Not only that, more listeners on our Discord channel suggested that the contest be more specific to me, asking me to populate the bracket with games that mean something to me. I did about half of those, and asked Patrick to do the same. Then I combined our lists, added a few "people's choice" titles to round it out, and then set up the bracket. Play along! I hope we get a good number of folks who submit their own official predictions at challonge.com, which is free. Some have already done it. You've until March 12 to submit your brackets, so you need to move quickly. Then the voting rounds will start via Geeklist polling. As you can see from the chart above, the successive rounds of this voting will start happening every three days: On March 15 we'll have the results of the first round, when 64 teams are winnowed down to 32 survivors. Then it proceeds to the Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final 4, and Championship. Who will be the winner? We expect to do "micro-episode" podcasts throughout the month to talk about each round. They'll show up in your regular feed, and I can link them here, too. -Mark
Last year was a great year of boardgaming for me. Apparently I played more games than ever, whether you include online plays or not. In this episode I go over the ones I played the most, the ones I liked the most, and some topics other than titles themselves. Like...gaming events I attended, others I'm aiming for in 2024, my excitement for the growing library of "history games," and how I'm still unsatisfied that boardgames haven't built as much connection to travel or place as they could. Closer: Mark Madness is coming back for 2024, and last year's champion Patrick Pence is helping me! We want your suggestions for divisions & games to go up against each other. -Mark
Opener: Welcome to Season 20(!!!) of this little podcast
I didn't make it to BGGcon last November, but several of my buddies did. Two of them, Greg Pettit and Dave O'Connor, join me on the podcast to talk about their experience there. For almost half the time we talk about about everything BUT the games (the venue, the crowd, the bazaar, the puzzle hunt, etc)...and then we get into a lot of games. We talk about Heat, Anunnaki, Wandering Towers, Bristol 1350, 1902 Melies, Blood on the Clocktower, Oak, Tricky Badger, Match of the Century, That's Not A Hat, Rebel Princess, Rollet, Armadillo, At The Office, Voodoo Prince, Gang of Dice, Babylonia, Havalandi, Pax Pamir, Turncoats, Cosmoctopus, Nemesis, Cosmic Frog, and The Thing! Whew! Closer: Playing games with family (especially party games) using whatever "rules" and "scoring" are most fun -Mark
I'm a pretty positive guy, and I hope that normally comes through on my podcast. While I have distinct preferences for the kinds of games I play, I try to be willing to play most things. Or at least, when I turn something down I try to be kind about it. It helps to have been around long enough, wearing those preferences on my sleeve. My friends know the kind of big, plastic-filled, multi-hour fantasy fighting games that aren't for me.
However, it IS true that I have an inner monologue, and it can be frustrated with the aspects of our hobby that I don't like. Even worse, I think those aspects are detrimental to its wide enjoyment and acceptance with many people. You know how I open every episode by saying my podcast is about "family strategy boardgames"? Because that's what I like best, and it's what's most important. They're most important to me, and I'd say the wider success through mass market channels (Target, Amazon), plus increased role of our hobby on the culture...well, those things emphasize that family strategy games are generating the most joy for players and the most success for the industry. Especially on the Discord server, sometimes I'd be more open with those frustrations. Sometimes I just needed to vent a bit. At one point we made a separate discussion channel within that server just for #curmudgeon grumblings. Guess what? It has ended up being some of those most active discussions! Along the way it was suggested that one podcast episode be devoted to the same venting, and here we have it: The Curmudgeon Show. Two volunteers from Discord agreed to help me on this project, and the result is the final episode for this year, season 19. Take it in the spirit it was intended, and I always look forward to comments. Closer: I worked at making 2023 a better year for my hobby, and am so pleased that it worked! [That's not very curmudgeonly! -ed] -Mark
After hearing Ken Tidwell in last month's podcast, both Dave Arnott and I were impressed with his enthusiastic, optimistic, and forward-looking perspective on the boardgame hobby…despite being an old timer like us. Even older, I think! While neither of us can fully match that, it was inspiring and I asked Dave to consider the topic with me in an open discussion for THIS episode. We recorded it on an iPhone in a church choir room at our SoCal Games Day venue. The audio is ok, but you can tell it's not my normal setup. Also unusual was the lack of a show outline. It means that I struggle a bit to stay focused on the goal. Too often I flip it around and revert to talking about how new hobbyists can/should appreciate the old classics. While that's true, I tried to remember that I want to focus on how the OLD hobbyists can appreciate the new aspects of boardgaming. What are those new aspects? They can be the newest titles, designers, and publishers themselves. They could be Kickstarter and other new ways of marketing & funding. Perhaps it's the prevalence of online play, or solo options. The rise of YouTube videos for rules explanations. Lots of things. What am I missing?
The games I brought to my work event, full of hope. Partially fulfilled!
Closers: • Dave: Is there a best way to lose a game? • Mark: Gaming success with nongamer coworkers -Mark
If you entered the hobby as I did pre-2000, you didn't have BGG, podcasts, YouTube, or even a good way to buy games online. You often didn't have English rules in the box for what games you had in your small collection. But what you did have is The Game Cabinet. This was probably the very first boardgame website that ever existed. It was created by Silicon Valley boardgamer Ken Tidwell, who was at the leading edge of the hobby and the Internet. Thanks to Ken's website we had our first access to game reviews, letters columns, information about where to buy games, and online versions of Mike Siggins' famous boardgame zine, Sumo (fullname Sumo's Karaoke Club). I cannot properly convey how important and influential this website was to those of us getting started. Although it was a website, it was presented as an online magazine with numerous "issues" as it was periodically updated with a batch of fresh content. Its last issue was published in 2000. But it's still online! Go visit it at gamecabinet.com.
As an oldtimer myself, I've wanted to get Ken on my podcast for many years. Finally I managed to do it. I was delighted and surprised to have Ken tell the story of The Game Cabinet...but it turned out not to be a story stuck in the past. We definitely spend a good chunk of time talking about those early days, but when Ken disappeared online over two decades ago he didn't stop playing games. Not only that, he maintained his fascination with the leading edge of creativity in game design. In a nutshell, he's no curmudgeon like me! He's still got an enormous collection, goes to conventions, plays lots of games, is fascinated with the innovations of the Tokyo Game Market...and even Kickstarter. He's on a number of Discord servers and stays plugged in. He's even up on the indie RPG world that I keep hearing about, too. Closer: Considering what's most important to me in this hobby for 2024...and practicing it in the last quarter of 2023 -Mark
Opener: Britannia Once again, I've been fortunate to gather a panel of smart gamers from my Discord server to chat on this episode. Patrick, Eric, and Joe joined me to discuss game conventions. We talk about large ones, small ones, and how I think "invitationals" and games days are something slightly different. Certainly related, but I wanted to talk more about the kind of events anyone listening might decide to attend next year. There are local conventions, as well as national (even international) ones that require getting on an airplane. Why would you go to all of that trouble & expense, when you can just play games at home with friends. Well, we have our reasons. Do they match yours? Towards the end we share some of our better game convention experiences, as well as plans to attend this or that in the year to-come. For example, if you're planning to attend SDHistCon this November, or else Dice Tower West in Las Vegas next March, let me know! Closer: History-grounded eurogames that inspire me when traveling -Mark
Opener: Stockpile Closer: Ennui about the SdJ, which is surprising/disappointing Solo boardgaming is big, and getting bigger. At least, that's my impression. It's not something I know a bunch about myself. I've dabbled in solo boardgames for many years, and I've done solo wargames extensively, but there are euro boardgamers who play a lot of solo boardgames. There's a whole community for this slice of the hobby, and publishers are serving them. There are games exclusively designed for solo play, and lots of "regular" multiplayer games that have a solo option. On our Discord server I posted some of my explorations and questions with solo boardgames, it got some response, and soon we had a separate discussion channel to continue to conversation. From there I found a few gamers happy to join me on this episode of the podcast to talk about solo boardgaming. In true BGTG style, we name-drop a number of titles, but most of the episode is a higher level meta-discussion about solo boardgaming as a hobby-within-a-hobby. What types of solo boardgames are there, why do you play solo boardgames, and what is the community of solo boardgamers. 1 Player GuildSolitaire Games On Your Table (most recent monthly compilation) 2022 People's Choice Top 200 Solo Games -Mark
My friend Davebo has been on the podcast many times, but not for a while. During the time he's been away he decided to sell his California home and relocate to North Carolina, both to be by his oldest kid, now married, as well as to start a new chapter in life. In the podcast he talks a little about those reasons, and what it's like to be a boardgamer who uprooted himself from local groups and friend networks to be in a new place, finding & meeting new people. Of course, gamers do this all the time, but I'm more familiar with it happening earlier in life, when you go off to college, get your first professional job somewhere else, maybe move again to buy a home & start a family. Or like me, maybe you had a career move at some point, like when I moved 300 miles from Norcal to SoCal, leaving behind MY local game group. At that time, I wasn't much more than thirty years old, and finding new gamer friends was something I needed to do...but I don't recall feeling especially challenged by it. Now, though, I can anticipate another move when I eventually retire, and finding new friends when I'm in my sixties feels different. Perhaps it shouldn't, but I'm a little daunted just thinking about it. Dave's not in his sixties, but he's not in his thirties, either. He's now done what I will need to do eventually. Of course, it matters what sort of community you find yourself in, how expansive your hobby is, and other factors. Online gaming was always around, but really took off during the pandemic. That's an interesting way to meet new people AND stay in touch with the gamers "back home." Closers: • Dave: "High five" games • Mark: Can we get more boardgames that tie in to landmarks, places to visit, and a sense of history? -Mark
Opener: Ark Nova...on BoardgameArena I feel like most of this year--really everything since BGGcon last November--has been about me embracing the fullness of this hobby in a post-pandemic way. Along with the realization that no one can really embrace ALL of it. There's just too much. I've simultaneously been maximizing my hobby and realizing the unavoidable limitations involved. This episode certainly fits that overall "story arc." In May I managed to play a lot of games with various friends in all sorts of settings: my local game group, on a business trip, at a Games Day, during a lunch hour at work, online in several ways, and more. Plus there's the extra parts of our hobby, like podcasts and magazines. Looking back, I feel like I did a LOT. Even so, I'm aware of the things I didn't do, because there's just so much time in a month. At least several of those opportunities were with a wider range of gaming friends, something that wasn't possible a year or two ago. Closer: Spiel des Jahres nominations and recommendations
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