Free-range thoughts about design, writing, and play
My daughter and I played a pile of games at Board Game Bash a few weeks ago, and Tales of the Arabian Nights is the last one on my review pile. Oddly enough, the weakest game we played may have been the most fun. Tales of the Arabian Nights is a dinosaur revived for the…
Our group had a videographer from the San Marcos Daily Record come by a few weeks ago, and the video is now up on Youtube. Check it out! Archived from the San Marcos Board Gamers website.
I enjoy new games, but it takes years to properly appreciate a classic. I recently had a chance to renew my love affair with Acquire, and it reminded me that when you get a game design right, it’s timeless. It can also be like a British superspy, but we’ll get to that. Sid Sackson‘s masterpiece…
Splendor is one of the hot games of the year, with lots of buzz on various podcasts and videos, plus a prestigious Spiel de Jahres nomination. So when I ran into a game being set up at Board Game Bash 2014, I jumped at it. But was Splendor worth the wait? The set-up is deceptively simple. You get…
We had lots of new faces at our August library meetup! It’s great to have new people to play with, and bodes well for the “organization” as we move into the fall of our second year. It was a good day for current favorites as Roll Through the Ages and Smash Up hit the table….
One of the best things about a convention like Board Game Bash is that you get a chance to play games you’re not sure about yet. That was the case on Sunday morning, when I got a chance to review Navegador by stumbling in just as a group was setting up to play it. I…
Board Game Bash 2014 was held the first weekend of August, and it was a blast! I saw several members of the San Marcos Board Gamers running around, and I hope they had as much fun as I did. Jonathan Grabert has been running this convention for several years now, and it’s settled into a comfortable…
We had a special guest at last week’s July Library Meetup! Aidan Diaz at the San Marcos Daily Record came by to take some pictures and talk with the group. It’s hard to tell if this will turn into a story — board games are fun, but they’re not as dynamic as Lego events or Pearl Harbor…
That was fast! It seems like just yesterday that I was setting up a meetup group, but this week the San Marcos Board Gamers complete their first year as an organization! “Organization” is a strong word, of course. We don’t really do anything formal, and I for one would like to keep it that way….
We played a bunch of micro-games at our June library meetup, and Eight Minute Empire was arguably the hit of the afternoon. That takes nothing away from Sail to India, though, which packs a meaty economic game into a few cards and cubes. In Sail to India, you are a Portuguese noble out to better his fortunes by…