Episode 591 – What If?! Tabletop Twists
What if one moment in tabletop gaming history had gone differently?
This week on Board Gamers Anonymous, Chris and Tim are messing with the timeline. In our Voice of the Gamers feature, we ask the tabletop questions you probably shouldn’t ask: What if a landmark game had never been published? What if a major designer had made a completely different choice? What if an influential publisher never existed? What if a convention never took off—or a game that changed the hobby had completely flopped?
Change one decision, remove one game, alter one moment…and suddenly the tabletop hobby we know today might look very different. We’re pulling at the loose threads of gaming history to see what unravels, what takes its place, and whether we’d even recognize the hobby on the other side.
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Chris checks out Bookwyrm: A Cozy Strategy Game of Beautiful Bookshelves, a cozy strategy game where book-hoarding dragons attempt to organize their overflowing collections, building and scoring bookshelves while inevitably being tempted to acquire even more books. Apparently, dragons and board gamers have the same problem.
Tim previews Electrify, the upcoming engine-building game from AEG designed by John D. Clair and Ian Hutchison. Players develop an evolving energy industry across five revolving sectors, upgrading and chaining actions as they attempt to meet an increasingly power-hungry world’s demands.
Roll for Review
Chris heads somewhere considerably less cozy with Enemies of Gotham City, a competitive area-control game that puts Batman’s famous rogues—not the Caped Crusader—in the spotlight. Joker, Poison Ivy, Penguin, Two-Face, and the rest battle for control of Gotham while Batman and his allies attempt to ruin everyone’s perfectly reasonable plans for criminal domination.
Tim reviews Dewan, a fast-playing competitive game of territory, placement, and hand management from designers Johannes Goupy and Yoann Levet. Players lead their tribes across a resource-scarce landscape, establishing camps, gathering resources, and completing story objectives along the way.
So join us as we review what’s coming, what’s hitting our tables—and then completely rewrite tabletop history.
Because every great game starts with “What if?” This week, we’re asking what happens when the answer changes everything.
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