Analysis

When you love an artist, it’s a wonderful pleasure to slowly work your way through their catalogue,filtering it all through the twin lenses of your own passion and hindsight and charting in your head how they evolved over the course of their career. It’s as true of musicians and directors as it is of painters and sculptors. You’ll linger lovingly over your favourites of course, but the big picture and evolution are what’s really important.Only recently have we been able to do the same thing for video games, now that the design and programming titans of our youth are...

It is the sworn duty of every board game writer to come up with a “best of” article at the end of every year. This is carved in stone, from the beginning of the internet. I’m curious sometimes what would happen if someone were to NOT give their year-in-review article. I suspect that the internet would proceed as it always has, but I worry there’s a slim chance it sends us plummeting to a fiery death. I think it might be better not to risk it.

And so we come, without due ceremony, to the last of my yearly writing traditions: the top-rated games of people who hold the “Ameritrash fan” badge on boardgamegeek. The rules, as ever, are that a game must have at least 30 ratings from amongst the 814 people that own the badge, only base games count, only the highest entry from a series or multiple editions of a game count, and the results are ordered by average rating first, number of raters second.You may recall that last year, the fifth anniversary of the list, I inaugurated a new tradition: silver...

The first hobby game that I learned to play was The Settlers of Catan, which I got into just prior to my senior year of college. Needless to say, it was a big hit with me and my friends, but we had a very real problem with the game: it only played four people. Imagine our delight when we discovered that there was a way to expand the number of players who could be accommodated by a small box with extra components to let two more people play. We played so much that it’s a miracle we graduated at...

I seem to have fallen into an end-year pattern when it comes to writing: I close the year with a best-of list and open the new one with a rundown of what I’ve been playing and what I hope to play in the coming months. Dull, but comforting, like lexical porridge. This year I’m going to open the writing with something a little different, a little more personal and talk not just about games but about writing.I think I learned more about games writing this year than any of the other five that I’ve been doing it for. It’s...