Boardgames To Go

Mike suggested his own topic for this podcast: the elusive hybrid game that combines elements of Euro games (short play, elegant mechanics, nice bits) and wargames (real history, maybe nice maps). To a large degree, the games we want to talk about don't yet exist. But several attempts have been made to varying degrees of success, and that's what we discuss. Mike also speculates about the growth

Listener, Siggins.Siggins, Listener.The oldtimers in this hobby will recognize the name instantly, as well as my play on Ken Tidwell's introduction of Mike Siggins to his new readers on the Internet. Mike was one of the earliest writers and savvy reviewers of the new crop of German boardgames. Starting in the late 1980s(!) with other mags, he's most notable for his decade-long, near-solo effort

Although this podcast will never be about wargames in a substantial way, I still play the occasional wargame and still consider myself a wargamer. Just an infrequent one. :-) Even though I don't play them so often, my interest in military history remains (all history, really). After hearing more about wargames on other podcasts, reading some Consimworld again, and generally experiencing my

Here's part 2 of the show, the longer part that is the in-depth treatment of Verräter. You know, I'd love to get a translation of Casasola Merkle's "Entsehung" page for the game. It tells the story of the game's development. I can understand part of it using an online translator, but those are always sketchy.-MarkLinksVerräterBrettspielwelt (where you can play Verräter and many others online in

You can tell from the date that I've had this show recorded for a week already. The "All About" shows are often my most well-regarded . . . by both my listeners and myself! So you know I didn't want to sit on this one, especially for one of my favorite games. However, the quality of the sound recording meant that I had to work a little harder to fix this one up. I hope you're able to hear it ok,

I think this is settling into a standard format for this podcast: an audio session report show with feedback/letters section tacked onto the end for BGTG-aholics. (The other standard format is the theme show, especially the All About shows featuring just one game in depth.) In this show I get back in the saddle again with a Santa Clarita Boardgamer session, though a bit too rambly at the

Ryan shows up in lots of my session reports because he's the most constant figure at Santa Clarita Boardgamer sessions. He and his wife Erin host most of our game nights. With that in mind, this show was intended to be about the "care & feeding" of local game groups: how to start one up and keep it going strong. That's pretty much what was recorded, though it also rambled through some fun history

Though I've missed the past three Santa Clarita Boardgamers sessions (drat), I've still had a few opportunities for playing games. Here are some opinions about those, including a new play-by-web offering, Torres.Also, I hadn't included any email (or voicemail!) feedback for a while, so it was starting to pile up. Rather than cut that short, I decided to move the feedback segment of the show to

Another All About show, another with a second voice, and another long one! This should be interesting... Though I normally prefer shows to be shorter, perhaps only half as long, this is also the kind of show I'd like to listen to. But does anyone else feel the same? An hour of two guys talking minutiae about Medici: whether you ever flip more than one card for auction, offensive vs. defensive

This was a fun show to record, sitting down with the local gamer & friend who designed the BGTG logo(s). After some general chat about how Greg's background, how he got into the hobby, and joined the Santa Clarita Boardgamers, we got into the main theme of the show: boardgame presentation. For a graphics and design-savvy guy like Greg, that value of a game's good presentation is obvious. For a

It's been a long time coming, but I finally got my wife Candy to join me for a podcast. Considering how popular and everlasting the question "How can I get my wife/girlfriend to play games with me?" is on discussion boards, this podcast should be of interest to many. Candy plays games with me, sure, but she's not an avid hobbyist like myself. Or rather, she's got her own avid hobbies--boardgames

Sorry for the nearly 2-week break between podcasts. That wasn't my plan, but life sometimes gets busy. Fortunately, half of that was for a fun weekend spent winetasting with Candy when the kids stayed with my folks. We went to the Santa Ynez valley area made more famous recently by the movie Sideways.But this show isn't about that--it's about catching up on some older feedback (including another

A little bit longer podcast this time, as we played lots of games and had some interesting discussion to boot! Plus, I responded to feedback at the beginning of the show, something I hadn't done for a while.By the way, one of the reasons we played Tower of Babel at this session was to counteract the botched rules at an earlier outing. I wasn't at that previous session, so those forgotten/

Finally! I've wanted to get back to a theme show for a while, and one on microgames has been on my to-do list. As I say in the show, this is really sort of training me for doing some shows about wargames. I'm not ready to do that yet, but it will come someday.This was another recording using the mobile device, a Treo 650, rather than my normal laptop & headset mic rig. There's a drop in audio

Over a week between podcasts, rats! Well, sometimes our lives get busy, right? Between a crunch at work . . . and a literal crunch at home (car crash--everyone's ok), there wasn't a chance to record anything recently. Hopefully I'll catch up soon.First up is another in-between show. I guess it's mostly an audio session report, but since it talks about SoCal Games Day, and especially dads playing