Author: Drew

The brainchild of Clif Dickens, humor website Honest Slogans shows how products would advertise themselves if honesty ruled every company’s Marketing Department. Some of my recent favorite satires include Comcast, Bic pens and Trader Joe’s. But, of course, me new favorite is the card game we’ve all come to love… to hate… Cards Against Humanity.

Board Gamers Anonymous is Now on Stitcher! Download the app and play us on 1.5x speed to save time! PUBLISHERS Five Tribes Now Available for Preorder from Days of Wonder. It’s Mancala for a modern age! Dice Tower & Arcane Wonders announced a new line of Dice Tower Essentials games. Sheriff of Nottingham is not a new game, but an overlooked foreigner finally coming to America’s shores. Rio Grande & Donald X. Vaccarino (Dominion) announced Temporum. I love stories about Alternate Futures and chaning Timelines (aka, Time Travel!) AWARDS Spiel des Jahre winners announce. Dice Tower Award winners announced. Spiel…

IT HAPPENED ON THIS DAY… …in 1793, that Maximilien de Robespierre was elected to revolutionary France’s Committee of Public Safety. He would be a member of that body for exactly one year, as… …also on July 27th, in 1794, Robespierre was removed from the Committee and arrested. He would lose his head the following day. The Committee was established on April 9th, 1793, to help bring stability to the French government. It wasn’t working out for them. So, in July, 1794, a coup overthrew the Committee, in the quaintly named Thermidorian Reaction (don’t ask…). So, July 27th just naturally belongs…

(The Reddit Report is a weekly look at the most interesting Reddit threads & comments, published every Saturday.) LCG vs. CCG – Which do you prefer, and why? submitted by JoeDarts I didn’t expect such strong debate on the subject. On the one hand,  CCG are essentially a marketing scheme. It is a business decision that often dilutes the quality of the game and strong-arm consumers into purchasing more than they would rather spend. But more than that, I find those who enjoy CCG to be a bit like gamblers; they are hoping to catch a rare card, make a…

There was a time in the 1960s where a Game Room was a must in every upwardly mobile family’s home. It wasn’t just for the kids, who were locked in their bedrooms whenever Mom & Dad invited friends over for a Cocktail Party, where guests could crowd the game tables for a rousing game of Tip-It or Tiddly-Winks Poker–and the occasional smart game like Probe or Tangle. Better Homes & Gardens, the unofficial magazine of the Upper-Middle Class, showed readers how a well-appointed Game Room lent just the right touch of frivolity to the sophistication that every upper middle-class couple…

A mid-week dump of the best blog posts from the last 7 days 1. A Foray into Gaming History (Chris Loses At) 2. How One Project Shaped Gaming’s Use of Crowdfunding (The Escapist) 3. Why the World Needs a Breaking Bad Board Game (Clever Move) 4. Yodelling (or Little Old Lady Who?) (Every Man Needs a Shed) THE POST OF THE WEEK A Foray into Gaming History, by Chris Fenton Chris Loses At!, July 16, 2014 Living History rocks! A teacher takes his kids to an old Tudor estate (Kentwell Hall, in England) to experience life as it was in…

Board Gamers Anonymous, part-blog & part-podcast, has widened its reach to include the Stitcher app, which encompasses 25,000 radio shows & podcasts. But don’t get the idea that just anyone can post to Stitcher. It’s a curated network where all submissions must meet a few criteria before being accepted. The best part of Stitcher is that it’s not iTunes. Now, Apple’s not a bad company, merely ubiquitous. So, any app that’s just as good as an Apple app is worth downloading. The file’s a lot smaller than iTunes, so it’s very smooth and fast. In addition to the iPhone/iPad, the…

(Almanac of Games is a weekly feature, published every Sunday) HISTORY: On July 20th 1944, Adolf Hitler is wounded in an assassination attempt fronted by a Tom Cruise lookalike. For a long time there was just one attempt at duplicating this event for tabletop, SPI’s 1976 release, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler. But toward the end of 2014, Philip duBarry (Revolution!) will release, through Game Salute, Hitler Must Die. No, it’s not an adaptation of Dr. Who’s “Let’s Kill Hitler,” but a co-op game where “you must collaborate with your fellow-traitors to gather supplies and manipulate events [so] that an opportunity…

(The Reddit Report is a weekly feature, published every Saturday.) Before I get to this week’s gimmick, I wanted to isolate a very helpful and important thread about making games more accessible. Making board games more accessible for those visually impaired submitted by thag_you_very_buch What can individuals do to privately adapt games, whether altering components to make them easily recognized or reformatting rulebooks into large print. The legal issues are discussed and reference made to a group (bigboardgames.net) which gets permission to print larger versions of wargames. Okay, now here’s the gimmick: This week, the threads neatly link to the…

The best writers in tabletop gaming continue to stay indoors and post a lot of thoughtful reading. Here are 4 fab blog posts from the past week, ranked in order of what I liked… 1. The Gift Economy (Stonemaier Games) 2. Gaming in Kazakhstan, part 2 (Gamerati) 3. 5 Board Games That Were Ahead of Their Times (Clever Move) 4. Towards a Grand Unified Theory of Boardgamery (Big Game Theory) THE POST OF THE WEEK The Gift Economy, Jamey Stegmaier Stonemaier Games, July 15 Inspired by The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde. Jamey applies…