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It is the time of cheer and joy - and giving: Christmas. Of course, for many of us it's about receiving gifts, but there is also a lot of joy to be gotten from giving. If you think Christmas has become over-commercialized, then it's especially important that you give a gift - and I don't mean buying someone something, but giving away what you've already got. I'm talking about giving away some of your board games to spread the joy of our hobby to others.
As you can probably tell from my review of The Crew, I love trick-taking games. I grew up with them. I learned to shuffle cards when I was about six and started to play Skat with my family when I was about eight. In secondary school, I learned Doppelkopf. I didn't play them for many years after I left school and it was only when I played Vivaldi at Gaming Rules' evening during last year's Essen Spiel Messe that I rediscovered the genre. So I wanted to talk more about my fascination with these games.
The old topic of "house rules" keeps cropping up. Some of us are purists and feel that you have to play games with the rules they came with, because otherwise you won't get the experience that the designer intended. Others feel that tweaking a few rules here and there can make a game more fun for you and the people you play with and that designers want us to enjoy their games. In this article, I want to speak for the latter group and show that house rules aren't a sacrilege.
As a board game reviewer, you need to have access to board games. That's obvious. Some reviewers rely solely on games they bought themselves, maybe got as presents or borrowed from friends, while others will only review games sent to them by the publisher or even the designer. Many reviewers will rely on a mix of both. What I want to look at in this article is how review copies, which are (usually) free, may influence a review and what the relationship between publishers, or designers, and reviewers may look like and how it can also play a part in how a review is written.
The longer we enjoy our hobby and the more games we play, the more our taste in games is likely to change. As a reviewer, I can only write about a game as I feel about it at the time, but even if my taste in games changes, the review will remain on the blog. So the question is whether a review should stay frozen in time or if it should be revisited with a fresh perspective. Let me try and answer those questions in this article.
As we all know, different people play games for different reasons and with different goals. Even the heaviest of games can be played in all sorts of different ways, and I don't mean with different strategies in mind. Sure, in an 18xx game, you probably want to do everything to win and it's unlikely that people will play it who just want to build scenic routes going through cities that they like - but it is a possibility. In this article, I want to look at the different motivations players have and how different games accommodate them to a larger or smaller extent.
So, the convention season for 2020 has drawn to a close, and it’s obviously been a very different set of experiences compared to The Before Times. The last show I actually physically attended was AireCon back in spring, and even that was under the shadow of the then-upcoming nationwide lockdown in the UK, a last hurrah before we all spent the summer indoors. Since then, many and various show organisers have done their damnedest to pivot and transform their events into an online format, all with varying degrees of success. And frankly, despite their best efforts, no single event has managed to get close to the real deal. Lessons have been learned, of course, and if things continue as they seem to be on track to do, Year Two of the Online Convention will invariably be better - but what would I like to see from them?
If you have played a number of games, you will have noticed how the pace in some games changes over time. A game might start slow and then speed up towards the end, or it keeps an even pace throughout. Some games even slow right down in the last round. In this article, I want to look at this more closely and see what affects the pace of a game.
A 60 miles an hour dust storm is whistling around the small Mars base, pulling at the airlock, shaking the whole station side to side and blowing over the tiny buildings with a deep rumbling sound, while the computer equipment fans quietly hum away in the background and a random bleep from one of the monitoring systems indicates that our communications channels to Earth are still down. No, this isn't a review of one of the many Mars themed games available these days, but an idea of how you might set the scene for everyone when playing one of those games, because in this article I want to talk about how you could create a thematic atmosphere when playing board games with your friends.
Now, that many of us no longer meet in person, many face-to-face games groups have stopped meeting and have gone online. Of course, online isn't the same as "in real life", so I want to use this article to look at how my virtual board gaming experience compares to playing with people sitting around a real table.
