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weird games only

play is sacred


One thing I'm broadly not a fan of in board game discourse is the concept of games "firing" others. It tends to succumb to a consumerist bend very quickly, that is to say, "you have to pick up X because it's just better than Y, the game you already know and have".

Poppycock! Ridiculous! I laugh in the face of such a premise!

A personal familiar favorite, one somebody plays again and again with friends and family, is likely there for a reason. It takes on a new identity that's more than just a ruleset in a box. To say "that game you like is just worse than this other one I'm currently hot on bc I just played it" is a real brain't move. Novelty addiction is a real problem that everyone struggles with to some extent - I certainly do - but surely we can do better than directly catering to it?



One thing that's come to...not annoy me, amuse me I guess? Is how board game people latch onto words and then overuse/misuse them constantly. "Fiddly", "euro", "theme", what have you. But the one that actually does annoy me a little bit is the frequent misuse of "genre" when they mean "mechanism".

For folks who don't know, let me make a comparison. Say you were playing a first person shooter where manual reloads are a constant factor. If this were a board game, a substantial number of contemporary board game neophytes would insist on calling it "a reloading game". Not "a shooter with reloading" or "a game where you have to load the bullets back in the gun", just "a reloading game", as if the game was entirely about competitive speedloading.

Ridiculous, right? But this is what mechanism-first descriptions do, drawing all attention to parts that barely matter. Who cares if the game has drafting or worker placement or deckbuilding - what are players actually doing?



I have a recommendation for you, but it's going to take some effort. There are steps involved. I promise you it's worth it.

First you need to find yourself some friends. If you're on Cohost your friends are likely mostly online. My condolences, but that actually works perfectly for the purposes of this exercise.

Next you need a Discord account. You probably already have one of those too because, come on.

One of your friends, the online ones, they'll need a Discord account too. Again, this is probably already done.

Here's the hard part: you need to either find a friend who has Discord Nitro or convince someone to purchase it. I know, this is a horrid turn, but stay with me. You've come this far.

Once you have a Nitro'd friend, bring everyone into a Discord server. No more than 8 people, less is fine.

Your Nitro'd friend will then click Start an Activity. From there they will start a game of Bobble League.

You are welcome.



The perfect light skirmish game is something I've been chasing for a long time. Something with light unit count and decent depth. The dream would be to like one enough to inspire a local scene, but the realistic hope is just finding really good ones. Neither happens very often.

I try many, rarely finding much reason to stick around. Unmatched seemed like it could've worked early on but faceplanted pretty hard with the licensed sets, not to mention a refusal to ever adjust or errata anything. Warhammer Underworlds was good but got buried under a deluge of product with little support otherwise. Summoner Wars 2nd Ed is great, but came out in the midst of the plague times which gutted its chance of catching on. That one still hurts.

I hold out hope, I always do. Gonna try a few more soonish that hopefully impress or at least entertain. Sometimes I even wonder if I like this genre as much as I just like the idea of it.