On to the next category – non-historical games! This year, we see a mix of the new(-to-me) and a very old favorite.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Agent Avenue (Christian Kudahl/Laura Kudahl, Nerdlab Games)

One of my more recent discoveries… and it is all about discovery itself: You want to discover the other player’s secret identity, which you do by catching up to them on the circular track. Of course, your opponent wants the same, and so both of you try to go as fast as they can by enlisting the most helpful of your suburban neighbors (all of which are anthropomorphic animals) to your cause. Yet you must always select two cards from your hand for recruiting, place one of them face-up and the other face-down – and then your opponent gets to select one of them (and discover if they made the right choice).

Can you bait them with the great face-up card and take the even better face-down card for yourself? Or can you trick them into thinking that this is just what you want them to do, so they select the face-down card which turns out to be utter trash? Such are the thoughts of retired agents.

Let’s not even get into the intricacies of the instant victory (by enlisting enough codebreakers) or instant defeat (by enlisting too many daredevils), or the special equipment you can buy from the black market in the advanced version. Agent Avenue has you outwit, outbluff, and sometimes outluck your opponent in 10 to 20 breezy minutes.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal (Asger Harding Granerud/Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Days of Wonder)

I have sung Heat’s praises in general in the farewell post on new-to-me games. Here, let me expand on the Schwerpunkt of its mechanics – heat management. Heat represents the strain on your car. In game terms, that’s heat cards clogging up your hand. They cannot be played (ugh) and not even discarded (double ugh), thus costing you both raw power and flexibility. The only way to get rid of them is to shift down and let your machine recover in low speeds… while watching everybody else get ahead of you.

So, should you avoid heat at any cost? – No! You will to take a certain amount of it to win. Sometimes you need to crank up your speed quickly, sometimes you want to boost a movement to put yourself in a position where you can slipstream past opponents. If you have a low-gear stretch soon after taking on the heat, you might be able to shed the heat before it did any damage. The intriguing gamble of how much heat you can incur and how to get rid of it without sacrificing speed is the heart of Heat.

And my favorite non-historical game of the year was…

Catan Card Game (Klaus Teuber, KOSMOS)

The Catan Card Game has a special place in my heart. It was the first board game I ever played with my friend F., and after F.s death left only M. and me as two sides of our original Magical Triangle, the Catan Card Game turned into a mainstay of our meetings. We used to play the Expanded Basic Game but tried the Tournament Game this year – which means instead of having all the cards from the base game and potential expansions at your (aleatory) disposal, players use a pre-constructed deck of 33 cards.

That provides plenty of personalization. We used a university-based deck and one which aims for fast city construction and trade dominance – two very different approaches which both worked well (one victory per deck). And the joy of playing is complemented with the joy of deck construction. I already have some ideas on my mind for a future deck.

And what were your favorite non-historical games this year? Let me know in the comments!

On to the next category – non-historical games! This year, we see a mix of the new(-to-me) and a very old favorite.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Agent Avenue (Christian Kudahl/Laura Kudahl, Nerdlab Games)

One of my more recent discoveries… and it is all about discovery itself: You want to discover the other player’s secret identity, which you do by catching up to them on the circular track. Of course, your opponent wants the same, and so both of you try to go as fast as they can by enlisting the most helpful of your suburban neighbors (all of which are anthropomorphic animals) to your cause. Yet you must always select two cards from your hand for recruiting, place one of them face-up and the other face-down – and then your opponent gets to select one of them (and discover if they made the right choice).

Can you bait them with the great face-up card and take the even better face-down card for yourself? Or can you trick them into thinking that this is just what you want them to do, so they select the face-down card which turns out to be utter trash? Such are the thoughts of retired agents.

Let’s not even get into the intricacies of the instant victory (by enlisting enough codebreakers) or instant defeat (by enlisting too many daredevils), or the special equipment you can buy from the black market in the advanced version. Agent Avenue has you outwit, outbluff, and sometimes outluck your opponent in 10 to 20 breezy minutes.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal (Asger Harding Granerud/Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Days of Wonder)

I have sung Heat’s praises in general in the farewell post on new-to-me games. Here, let me expand on the Schwerpunkt of its mechanics – heat management. Heat represents the strain on your car. In game terms, that’s heat cards clogging up your hand. They cannot be played (ugh) and not even discarded (double ugh), thus costing you both raw power and flexibility. The only way to get rid of them is to shift down and let your machine recover in low speeds… while watching everybody else get ahead of you.

So, should you avoid heat at any cost? – No! You will to take a certain amount of it to win. Sometimes you need to crank up your speed quickly, sometimes you want to boost a movement to put yourself in a position where you can slipstream past opponents. If you have a low-gear stretch soon after taking on the heat, you might be able to shed the heat before it did any damage. The intriguing gamble of how much heat you can incur and how to get rid of it without sacrificing speed is the heart of Heat.

And my favorite non-historical game of the year was…

Catan Card Game (Klaus Teuber, KOSMOS)

The Catan Card Game has a special place in my heart. It was the first board game I ever played with my friend F., and after F.s death left only M. and me as two sides of our original Magical Triangle, the Catan Card Game turned into a mainstay of our meetings. We used to play the Expanded Basic Game but tried the Tournament Game this year – which means instead of having all the cards from the base game and potential expansions at your (aleatory) disposal, players use a pre-constructed deck of 33 cards.

That provides plenty of personalization. We used a university-based deck and one which aims for fast city construction and trade dominance – two very different approaches which both worked well (one victory per deck). And the joy of playing is complemented with the joy of deck construction. I already have some ideas on my mind for a future deck.

And what were your favorite non-historical games this year? Let me know in the comments!

The final new features we bring to the app in 2025 are all for Insights!

---

BGI 400 The One About The Fall of the House of Diamond

Board Games Insider – Join our Guild on Board Game Geek Guild | Like us on FB

Social media:

Ignacy Trzewiczek / Portal Games: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Corey Thompson / Above Board TV:  website | Youtube

Stephen Buonocore / “The Podfather Of Gaming”: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com

💾

On to the next post in my Farewell series! Today, it’s all about works of historical fiction. Here are the three I liked best this year.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Antony and Cleopatra (Colleen McCullough)

Long-time readers of this blog know my infatuation with Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. I have been reading the series since 2018 at the appropriately epic pace of one book per year (and last year, I skipped). Masters of Rome reading was always a highlight of my literary year – the high drama, the broad historical canvas painted with a myriad of characters, events, and microplots, and, most of all, McCullough’s readiness to engage the ancients on their own terms, with ever so many pages dedicated to this legislation or that campaign.

McCullough had planned to end the series after the sixth instalment (The October Horse, which covers the years 44 to 42 BCE). Only her fans’ pleas convinced her to write Antony and Cleopatra. Maybe that shows a little bit – the book takes a long time (say, the first 200 pages) to hit its stride, and never quite reaches the heights of previous instalments. Yet that mostly shows how good these books were (peaking with novel #5, Caesar), as this conclusion to the drama of the late Roman Republic was still one of my favorite historical novels in 2025.

Clarissa Oakes (Patrick O’Brian)

I’m continuing my re-read of the Aubrey-Maturin series, that delightful panorama of life at sea (and land!) during the Napoleonic Wars. Among the Aubrey-Maturin novels which I read this year, my favorite was #15 – Clarissa Oakes.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin want just one thing: Leave New South Wales and its mixture of brutal government (instigating clashes between the officers and men) and anti-Irish fervor (which gets Stephen into trouble). However, when the ship is out at sea, they realize that one of the younger officers has smuggled out a convict from the penal colony – an enigmatic young woman, who is bound to attract the attention of several of the men. No other book in the series makes so good on the premise of the characters being confined to a small ship, unable to avoid each other. And Clarissa, the escapee, is not just a plot device, but a complex and compelling character in her own right.

And my favorite historical novel of this year was…

A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles)

„Where is it now?“, asks the poem which kicks off the book – “it” being purpose. Having been written after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, the poem is widely seen as a call to action and inspires Russia’s revolutionaries… and thus they do not sentence the aristocratic author Count Alexander Rostov to death when he returns to Russia after the October Revolution. Under house arrest at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, he will spend the next thirty years rethinking and rediscovering his purpose. It will not count as a spoiler that he finds it in putting his abilities to good use and connecting with his fellow human beings – of course he does. Yet the point of the book is not the goal, but the winding way there, told with grace, nuance, and originality.

While the ending might be a bit kitschy, the unique protagonist, the cast of intriguing side characters and the delightful prose made this my favorite historical fiction read of the year.

Have you read any of these books – and, if so, what did you think? And what were your favorite historical novels of the year? Let me know in the comments!

On to the next post in my Farewell series! Today, it’s all about works of historical fiction. Here are the three I liked best this year.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Antony and Cleopatra (Colleen McCullough)

Long-time readers of this blog know my infatuation with Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. I have been reading the series since 2018 at the appropriately epic pace of one book per year (and last year, I skipped). Masters of Rome reading was always a highlight of my literary year – the high drama, the broad historical canvas painted with a myriad of characters, events, and microplots, and, most of all, McCullough’s readiness to engage the ancients on their own terms, with ever so many pages dedicated to this legislation or that campaign.

McCullough had planned to end the series after the sixth instalment (The October Horse, which covers the years 44 to 42 BCE). Only her fans’ pleas convinced her to write Antony and Cleopatra. Maybe that shows a little bit – the book takes a long time (say, the first 200 pages) to hit its stride, and never quite reaches the heights of previous instalments. Yet that mostly shows how good these books were (peaking with novel #5, Caesar), as this conclusion to the drama of the late Roman Republic was still one of my favorite historical novels in 2025.

Clarissa Oakes (Patrick O’Brian)

I’m continuing my re-read of the Aubrey-Maturin series, that delightful panorama of life at sea (and land!) during the Napoleonic Wars. Among the Aubrey-Maturin novels which I read this year, my favorite was #15 – Clarissa Oakes.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin want just one thing: Leave New South Wales and its mixture of brutal government (instigating clashes between the officers and men) and anti-Irish fervor (which gets Stephen into trouble). However, when the ship is out at sea, they realize that one of the younger officers has smuggled out a convict from the penal colony – an enigmatic young woman, who is bound to attract the attention of several of the men. No other book in the series makes so good on the premise of the characters being confined to a small ship, unable to avoid each other. And Clarissa, the escapee, is not just a plot device, but a complex and compelling character in her own right.

And my favorite historical novel of this year was…

A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles)

„Where is it now?“, asks the poem which kicks off the book – “it” being purpose. Having been written after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, the poem is widely seen as a call to action and inspires Russia’s revolutionaries… and thus they do not sentence the aristocratic author Count Alexander Rostov to death when he returns to Russia after the October Revolution. Under house arrest at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, he will spend the next thirty years rethinking and rediscovering his purpose. It will not count as a spoiler that he finds it in putting his abilities to good use and connecting with his fellow human beings – of course he does. Yet the point of the book is not the goal, but the winding way there, told with grace, nuance, and originality.

While the ending might be a bit kitschy, the unique protagonist, the cast of intriguing side characters and the delightful prose made this my favorite historical fiction read of the year.

Have you read any of these books – and, if so, what did you think? And what were your favorite historical novels of the year? Let me know in the comments!

As my board game collection grows, the chances of the same game being played regularly decrease. As a reviewer, that's fine, because I'm here to play new games and critically evaluate them. However, it's also sad that more and more of my games just sit there on the shelves unplayed, while the latest, shiny game barely lands before it makes it to the table. For many of us, playing board games isn't just about the games themselves, but the experiences we create with them and the people we share them with. So in this article, I want to look at the benefits of playing a small handful of games regularly, instead of briefly sampling many games once or twice, considering the psychological, social, and financial aspects that shape our hobby.

The post Regular Games – benefits of playing the same game with the same people (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

We wish you all a happy time with friends & family and as much board gaming as you want!

Eerko & Suzan

PS: keep an eye out for more insights, later this year

As the year comes to a close, I’ll do my usual end-of-year posts: My personal top three in a range of categories. As tradition commands, we’ll begin with the games that I played for the first time this year. Here are the best three.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Heat: Pedal to the Metal (Asger Harding Granerud/Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Days of Wonder)

I’m not much of a Formula 1 fan – from my point of view, nothing much happens during the races (after the start, that is), and in many years, even the championship as such is a bore because one driver/car combo is just too dominant. (This year has been excitingly different in that regard.)

Heat, however, takes just the exciting parts of racing and puts them together in an enthralling package of evocative mechanisms – downshifting before corners (and upshifting afterward), and the delicate balance of how to deal with the psychological stress on the driver and the physical stress on the car (the eponymous heat). And as the main planning phase is done simultaneously, there’s minimal downtime even with the full six players.

Vijayanagara (Cory Graham/Mathieu Johnson/Aman Matthews/Saverio Spagnolie, GMT Games)

I’m excited to learn new things from and with games. One topic I knew next to nothing about is the 14^th century in India. That, however, has changed a bit now due to Vijayanagara, a COIN-lite treatment of the collapse of the Delhi Sultanate’s hegemony under the challenge of invasion from the north (Timur’s Mongols) and centrifugal forces in the south (the nascent Bahmani Kingdom and Vijayanagara Empire). Every game of Vijayanagara tells a variation of that story.

I was happy to play several games of this intriguing debut design with my fellow board game bloggers Dave from Dude! Take Your Turn and Michal from The Boardgames Chronicle.

And my favorite new-to-me game of the year is…

Time of Crisis (Wray Ferrell/Brad Johnson, GMT Games)

Chaos – some games hate it, others, like Time of Crisis, embrace it. Whoever wants to be Roman emperor in the tumultuous third century must be prepared to deal with a whole whirlwind of challenges: Angry mobs want to drag your governors into the gutter, Barbarian tribes stand ready to cross the border into your provinces, and, worst of all, the rest of the Roman elite wants to be emperor, too, and will gleefully take whatever you possess.

I have been thwarted in my imperial aspirations by my fellow bloggers Alexander and Grant from The Players’ Aid as well as Dave and Michal, and have been loving every minute of it. Time of Crisis has been my most-played game overall this year (with 14 individual plays of it), and rightly takes the crown in this category.

What were your favorite new-to-me games this year? Let me know in the comments!

As the year comes to a close, I’ll do my usual end-of-year posts: My personal top three in a range of categories. As tradition commands, we’ll begin with the games that I played for the first time this year. Here are the best three.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Heat: Pedal to the Metal (Asger Harding Granerud/Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Days of Wonder)

I’m not much of a Formula 1 fan – from my point of view, nothing much happens during the races (after the start, that is), and in many years, even the championship as such is a bore because one driver/car combo is just too dominant. (This year has been excitingly different in that regard.)

Heat, however, takes just the exciting parts of racing and puts them together in an enthralling package of evocative mechanisms – downshifting before corners (and upshifting afterward), and the delicate balance of how to deal with the psychological stress on the driver and the physical stress on the car (the eponymous heat). And as the main planning phase is done simultaneously, there’s minimal downtime even with the full six players.

Vijayanagara (Cory Graham/Mathieu Johnson/Aman Matthews/Saverio Spagnolie, GMT Games)

I’m excited to learn new things from and with games. One topic I knew next to nothing about is the 14^th century in India. That, however, has changed a bit now due to Vijayanagara, a COIN-lite treatment of the collapse of the Delhi Sultanate’s hegemony under the challenge of invasion from the north (Timur’s Mongols) and centrifugal forces in the south (the nascent Bahmani Kingdom and Vijayanagara Empire). Every game of Vijayanagara tells a variation of that story.

I was happy to play several games of this intriguing debut design with my fellow board game bloggers Dave from Dude! Take Your Turn and Michal from The Boardgames Chronicle.

And my favorite new-to-me game of the year is…

Time of Crisis (Wray Ferrell/Brad Johnson, GMT Games)

Chaos – some games hate it, others, like Time of Crisis, embrace it. Whoever wants to be Roman emperor in the tumultuous third century must be prepared to deal with a whole whirlwind of challenges: Angry mobs want to drag your governors into the gutter, Barbarian tribes stand ready to cross the border into your provinces, and, worst of all, the rest of the Roman elite wants to be emperor, too, and will gleefully take whatever you possess.

I have been thwarted in my imperial aspirations by my fellow bloggers Alexander and Grant from The Players’ Aid as well as Dave and Michal, and have been loving every minute of it. Time of Crisis has been my most-played game overall this year (with 14 individual plays of it), and rightly takes the crown in this category.

What were your favorite new-to-me games this year? Let me know in the comments!

(Posting early so you have some reading during the Christmas break! Enjoy!)

On BGG I posted a geeklist with more thoughts on cheating.

If you read HPMOR you will probably like this — HPMOR is a Disney Movie about a Serial Killer (lots of spoilers).

David Byrne’s Tiny Desk Concert.

RPG Designer Monte Cook has a substack.

A furloughed IRS Lawyer opened a hot dog stand and called it Shyster’s — “The Only Honest Ripoff in DC“. (Photo and blurb).

Richard Ayoade interviewing Tim Burton on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. (For the Criterion Channel).

Via Marginal Revolution: We are repaganizing (in a Christian Magazine …. discusses Christianity, Abortion, Infanticide, Peter Singer, Medically Assisted Suicide and Paganism)

The Zvi’s thoughts on AI during the Winter Solstice — We will win.

Was there a second starting point of life that formed 1 cm long beings and died out on Earth 2B years ago? As always, Betteridge’s law looms large, but …. Possibly.

“Imagine that you’re much smarter than me, and I also party all the time and abuse drugs while you live a completely sober lifestyle. If I end up more economically successful than you are, you need to look inward and ask what you’re doing wrong. That is the situation of East Asia relative to the US and Europe.” Human Capital, Not Industrial Policy.

The Dave Berry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide

A 4th Chinese Poem constructed in a 29×29 grid of characters (similar to a magic square) palindromic poem that produces 4,000 sub poems (that rhyme and are coherent) depending on how the subsections are combined & read. Written (Embroidered, actually) by a 21 year old to woo back her husband, who had left her for a concubine. (“At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) – “heart.” Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui’s original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.”) A nice introduction (Twitter) . Wikipedia Page.

A runaway supermassive black hole found moving at 2.2 million mph near the Cosmic Owl.

Feral Historian discusses The Doomed City, a soviet SF novel (published after Perestroika) and uses footage from Dark City¹ because they share themes. In fact, after seeing the video, Dark City seems to clearly rip off The Doomed City’s “Experiment” and motifs, but Wikipedia does not show a link.

Video Game Trailer that I watched on a whim, and was delighted to find it giving off “Iron Giant” vibes. Coven of the Chicken Foot.

Birds — Not real, but conscious?

An LLM/AI was put in charge of the vending machine … “Profits collapsed, but morale soared.” “Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against an AI chief executive.”

Sumo — Aonishiki’s Elite Technique accounts for his astonishing rise. (Japan Times)

1. The very first DVD I bought, because it really is quite good, and Roger Ebert did a commentary track and that says something. ︎

(Posting early so you have some reading during the Christmas break! Enjoy!)

On BGG I posted a geeklist with more thoughts on cheating.

If you read HPMOR you will probably like this — HPMOR is a Disney Movie about a Serial Killer (lots of spoilers).

David Byrne’s Tiny Desk Concert.

RPG Designer Monte Cook has a substack.

A furloughed IRS Lawyer opened a hot dog stand and called it Shyster’s — “The Only Honest Ripoff in DC“. (Photo and blurb).

Richard Ayoade interviewing Tim Burton on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. (For the Criterion Channel).

Via Marginal Revolution: We are repaganizing (in a Christian Magazine …. discusses Christianity, Abortion, Infanticide, Peter Singer, Medically Assisted Suicide and Paganism)

The Zvi’s thoughts on AI during the Winter Solstice — We will win.

Was there a second starting point of life that formed 1 cm long beings and died out on Earth 2B years ago? As always, Betteridge’s law looms large, but …. Possibly.

“Imagine that you’re much smarter than me, and I also party all the time and abuse drugs while you live a completely sober lifestyle. If I end up more economically successful than you are, you need to look inward and ask what you’re doing wrong. That is the situation of East Asia relative to the US and Europe.” Human Capital, Not Industrial Policy.

The Dave Berry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide

A 4th Chinese Poem constructed in a 29×29 grid of characters (similar to a magic square) palindromic poem that produces 4,000 sub poems (that rhyme and are coherent) depending on how the subsections are combined & read. Written (Embroidered, actually) by a 21 year old to woo back her husband, who had left her for a concubine. (“At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) – “heart.” Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui’s original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.”) A nice introduction (Twitter) . Wikipedia Page.

A runaway supermassive black hole found moving at 2.2 million mph near the Cosmic Owl.

Feral Historian discusses The Doomed City, a soviet SF novel (published after Perestroika) and uses footage from Dark City¹ because they share themes. In fact, after seeing the video, Dark City seems to clearly rip off The Doomed City’s “Experiment” and motifs, but Wikipedia does not show a link.

Video Game Trailer that I watched on a whim, and was delighted to find it giving off “Iron Giant” vibes. Coven of the Chicken Foot.

Birds — Not real, but conscious?

An LLM/AI was put in charge of the vending machine … “Profits collapsed, but morale soared.” “Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against an AI chief executive.”

Sumo — Aonishiki’s Elite Technique accounts for his astonishing rise. (Japan Times)

1. The very first DVD I bought, because it really is quite good, and Roger Ebert did a commentary track and that says something. ︎

Lantern lifted, I stepped into the Crimson Cavern where a Tawny Steppe Wyvern crouched over a cache of meat and a single gleaming amethyst. It watched me calmly, dust motes swirling around its tawny wings. In the Golden Grotto, a Bellicose Firevern crackled with heat, sparks skittering across piles of scorched stone as it let out a low rumble. Finally, in the Amethyst Abyss, a Subterranean Basilisk hatchling blinked up at me, tiny and glittering, nestled among crystal shards. Once they got accustomed to me, the three dragons allowed me to go about my dracologist business and measure their Wyrmspan by Connie Vogelmann from Stonemaier Games with art by Clémentine Campardou.

The post Wyrmspan (Saturday Review) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

A crafty salesperson would push Snake Charmers as a cross between Cockroach Poker and The Resistance. This allusion is a strong sell, as it ties this new release to two of the best bluffing and deduction games ever designed. Fortunately, it is a reasonably accurate comparison, even if Snake Charmers can’t quite deliver the impact…

Read more →

BGI 399  The One About IP Games

Board Games Insider – Join our Guild on Board Game Geek Guild | Like us on FB

Social media:

Ignacy Trzewiczek / Portal Games: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Corey Thompson / Above Board TV:  website | Youtube

Stephen Buonocore / “The Podfather Of Gaming”: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com

💾

As an independent games designer and producer, a lot of my time involves visiting conventions to meet gamers and, ideally, sell my games to them. When I do so, it’s always a surprise how little crossover there is between people who play board games, roleplaying games and miniatures games, which is a pity since I think all of them have something special to offer. So I’d like to take this chance to explain exactly what I think is so special about miniatures games for anyone who doesn’t necessarily play, or even consider them.

The post Mini Magic – the human side of miniatures games (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.