In some ways, the origin story of the podcast can be traced back to Sentinels of the Multiverse. Upon arriving in Kingston, Mark was at a games event at someone's home, and he saw that someone had brought a then-complete set (this was a few expansions ago) of Sentinels. He knew that this person, namely Walker, was a person worth knowing. It therefore seemed fitting that on one of Mark's last days in Kingston that he, Walker, Huey, Dewey, and Louis play Sentinels.
"One day I was sitting in a gazebo, and there was a plaque on the gazebo and it said, 'This gazebo was built by the town in 1863.' That is in the middle of the Civil War. And the whole town built a gazebo. What was that town meeting like? 'All right, everyone, first order of business, we have all the telegrams from Gettysburg with the war dead. Let’s see here. Okay, everyone’s husband and brother and… everyone died. Okay. Josiah, you had something?' 'Yes, I do. How’d you like to be indoors and out of doors all at once? Ever walk into the park with your betrothed and it starts to rain, but you still want to hold hands? Well, may I introduce you to, and my condolences again to everyone, the gazebo!'"
-John Mulaney, "Kid Gorgeous at Studio City"
Games Played Last Week:
01:29 -Coyote (Spartaco Albertarelli, New Games Order, 2015)
04:07 -Tapple Mini (NPD Toys, The Op Games, 2025)
07:17 -Die fiesen 7 (Jacques Zeimet, Drei Hasen in der Abendsonne, 2015)
You gotta read the fine print, always. Anyone dealing with a supernatural entity--whether a djinn or deity, gremlin or god--has to be conscious of the exceptions. It's simple enough--if the wizard handing you a fantastical creature tells you not to feed it, you just don't feed it. Similarly, if someone promises not to kill you *in a certain way*, MacBeth can tell you that's more of a threat than a guarantee.
Before Dr. Reiner Knizia invented areas, everyone and everything was simultaneously co-located and yet distant all at the same time. It was primordial chaos. Movement was effectively impossible, as Xeno demonstrated; then Knizia did don his Bow-Tie of Delineation of Time and Space and constrained and liberated us all at once with his invention of areas.
While Mark is perhaps disappointed at the typical tragic dearth of questions related to Macross and Terry Bogard, and Walker secretly yearns to be granted naming rights to a listener's offspring (protip: don't let him), SVWAG answers all* of your questions!
In our effort to answer all of your Omnibus Questions, sadly we cannot enlist the assistance of notable Canadian Keanu Reeves. In an interview with Stephen Colbert--as a joke after Keanu said something profound--he was asked, "What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?" After a pause, and the audience's laughter, Keanu said, "I know that that the ones who love us will miss us."
I SAY DAYUM, KEANU
Games Played Last Week:
01:07 -Dogs of War Second Edition (Paolo Mori, Play to Z, 2026)
11:30 -Ostia (Totsuca Chuo, uchibacoya, 2022)
21:14 -SCOUT (Kei Kajino, Oink Games, 2019)
23:12 -Valheim: The Board Game (Ole Steiness, MOOD Publishing, 2025)
30:18 -Lunar Skyline (Charlie McCarron, Dead Alive Games, 2025)
38:57 -Thebai (Dávid Turczi, Bioard&Dice, 2025)
45:58 -Wilmot's Warehouse (Ricky Haggett, Richard Hogg, and David King, CMYK, 2024)
49:04 -Fairy Tale (Satoshi Nakamura, What's Your Game?, 2008)
News (and why it doesn't matter):
53:37 Render unto us your questions! Ask us anything for Omnibus Questions
54:10 Tigris & Euphrates to be reprinted by 25th Century games, art by Ian O'Toole
55:57 Mage Knight: Apocalypse Dragon expansion; cards will not match, changed font
We deliver this episode despite the officially mandated period of public mourning due to Toronto's setbacks in basesball. In Canada, public mourning is characterized by donning black jean jackets and swapping our Tragically Hip for the more down-tempo Blue Rodeo, to say nothing of abstaining from boardgaming.
Please don't turn us in for violating federal law. We might get banned from Tim Horton's.
01:44 AYURIS: An Age Contrived (Chris Matthew, Bellows Intent, 2024)
Games Played Last Week:
04:56 -X-ODUS: Rise of the Corruption (Second Edition) (Francisco Velasco E., Szilágyi L. Gábor, Yann Hilaire, Romain Lesiuk, & Bernardo Rippe, Bored Game Ink, 2026)
"'Frederick Chopin was a Polish composer in the Romantic style who wrote primarily for the piano.'
I guess this is sort of interesting, as most facts are. But history has shown us that *facts are not what most humans believe.* They are not that which motivates most men and women to love to or to crime.
Now COMPARE this statement:
'Frederick Chopin was a Polish composer in the Romantic style who was obsessed with ladybugs, often letting dozens of them gallop over his neck, arms, and long, tapering fingers while playing the piano.'
Obviously the lie is so much more compelling. It also explains how Chopin finally got rid of his aphid problem."
-John Hodgman, "The Areas of My Expertise"
Games Played Last Week:
01:28 -Phoenix New Horizon (Jorge J. Barroso, Devir, 2024)
As ever, we do not acknowledge one of the most pernicious false dichotomies in the rulebook space; whether rules should be strictly permissive (you can only do what the rules say you can) or strictly restrictive (you can do anything unless the rules say otherwise). I have never seen a rulebook forbid me from choking an opponent, nor have I see a rulebook give me permission to breathe. I will thus reject both models as being rather too simplistic.
"Wiarton Willie is the name given to a Canadian groundhog who lives in the community of Wiarton in Bruce County, Ontario. Every February 2, on Groundhog Day, Willie takes part in the local Wiarton Willie Festival. His role is to predict whether there will be an early spring. Although the original Wiarton Willie died in 1999, the Wiarton Groundhog Day celebrations continue each year with a successor of the original Willie (except in 1999 and 2021 where, due to the previous Willies' deaths, no groundhog was used), and each successor is also referred to as Wiarton Willie.
Groundhog Day, featuring Wiarton Willie, is a popular annual festival in Wiarton and is similar to events in other locations in North America. A midwinter celebration involving an animal with predictive powers was an element of Celtic culture. The link between weather prediction and the day is said to have been inspired by an old Scottish couplet: "If Candlemas Day is bright and clear/ There'll be two winters in the year.""
Rest assured that every topic we address here at SVWAG will be utterly comprehensive and final, unless and until we decide to address it again. Thus, when we discuss tile-laying games, we perforce will cover all of them, each and and every one, and failure to specifically mention any title means it does not exist and must be scrubbed from all records as a revisionist lie.
01:41 AYURIS: Kutná Hora: The City of Silver (Ondřej Bystroň, Petr Čáslava, and Pavel Jarosch, Czech Games Edition, 2023)
Games Played Last Week:
04:55 -Caper: Europe (Unai Rubio, Keymaster Games, 2022)
"A quipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber cords, and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color, order and number. The Inca, in particular, used knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in quipu cords. Depending on its use and the amount of information it stored, a given quipu may have anywhere from a few to several thousand cords. [...]
Inca administration used quipus extensively for a variety of uses: monitoring tax obligations, collecting census records, keeping calendrical information, military organization, and potentially for recording simple and stereotyped historical "annales"."
We are staunchly body positive here at SVWAG, but we do prefer our bears fat. "Let me have about me bears that are fat," said Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, or he would have, had he known about the glory that is Fat Bear Week. I guess Caesar wouldn't have been totally down with the democratic aspect of the whole voting thing, but whatever! Exercise your franchise and vote for the moist chonkers bears.
We tempt fate and refer to a number of third rails in the hobby community. For one, we acknowledge a loss in Regicide Legacy, which reliably summons the chattering mobs. Further, we mention both Star Trek and Star Wars, so undoubtedly we get a detail "wrong" that will "justify" a detailed response.
Look, we're experts here. We completed the Kobayashi Maru in under 12 parsecs. We're regular callers to Car Talk with Martok. Don't test us.
Games Played Last Week:
01:06 -Galactic Cruise (T.K. King, Dennis Northcott, and Koltin Thompson, Kinson Key Games, 2025)
05:30 -Spectres of Brocken (Aaron Lim, Web published, 2022)
Anmelden
