Spiel Spiel Spiel Spiel! It seems everybody is busy preparing for Spiel this week and we are no exception. If it is your first time going to Essen, we teamed up with Ella from Ella Loves Board Games to give you some preparation tips! We’re super happy that she said yes to our proposal to make this comic because Ella has traveled to board game conventions all over the world so she is the perfect person to give some advice.

Speaking of Spiel, we’ve got some fun things planned! We’re going to be on the Asmodee live stream on Saturday at 13.30 CET making a game in just 30 minutes with Gil Hova, designer of the Networks and Wordsy! We proposed to have Gil as the designer during our game jam so we’re excited that it all worked out! We’ll also be at the Gaming Rules meetup on Thursday, so if you really want to say hi or snap a selfie it is a lot easier to spot us there instead of trying to find us in one of the eight(!) halls.

If you’re not going to Spiel we have a little surprise in store for you on our social media, so be on the lookout for that. We don’t want to spoil too much but we’re going to switch things up a bit…

With all the preparations for this week, we haven’t played a ton of games. We did however pick up Gloomhaven again which is still a great dungeon puzzler, we’re now 27 plays in and we’re still curious about what we will encounter and unlock. We also played some Codenames, Color Brain: Disney edition and Century: Golem Edition.

Well, we’re off to pack our luggage as lightly as possible to make room for all the games, see you soon!

Ahhh legacy games, while not as prevalent as a few years ago our ears still perk up every time we hear somebody tell about their experiences. Did they make the same choices we did? What did they do with the cards they had to destroy? Would they play a legacy game again? It’s an experience that really sticks with you and it’s great to have somebody to talk to without having to fear spoiling the campaign.

Right now, we’re playing through a Charterstone campaign but other than that we’ll probably wait until Pandemic Legacy Season 3 comes along until we start a new one. We have played a lot of other things! We played some Dice Throne and The Binding Of Isaac Four Souls which we enjoyed even if it’s best described as “better Munchkin”. We also played a successful game of Century Golem with the nephews (6 and 8)! They picked up the game really well and the only changes we made were the removal of the coins and shortening the game to three golems. They loved the golems but were a tiny bit disappointed they couldn’t make the golems battle each other. 😂

We’ve also got a bunch of new games we can’t wait to try. Big Potato games sent us Blockbuster which is sort of a movie-themed version of Monikers, they showed the game to us at the UKGE and we really like the idea of making friends guess movies based on your reenactments or quotes.
Osprey sent us the beautiful new Gasland Refuelled hardcover, which combines the base game rules with all the free online expansions and some small balances on stats. Several friends have been requesting we’d organize a Gaslands day again, so the book is a very welcome additional motivator to mod some Hot Wheels again.
Osprey also sent Undaunted: Normandy and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Both titles look amazing thanks to the illustrations by Roland MacDonald and Ian O’Toole. We can’t wait until our summer break begins and we get to actually play all these games!

Speaking of Summer, we put a call out on Twitter for guest artists to help us and we got some great responses. We’re contacting artists now, so if you mailed us and we haven’t responded yet, we’ll get in touch with you this week.

— A big thank you to 999Games for sending us a copy of Wingspan!

The title of this comic might be a little farfetched. 😉 (Don’t get it? Click here)

So we’ve played Wingspan and think it’s a great engine building game and an amazing production showing how beautiful games can be. It did get us thinking about how its demand and reception surpassed every expectation, even from industry people. While this leads to some fun thoughts about shady powers behind the scenes pushing the popularity for certain games, it also got us thinking about paid (p)reviews and content for board games.

The number of people playing board games is growing and so are the number of games, the amount of publishers and people creating content about board gaming. Because of this, it is hard as a publisher to get your games noticed and some content creators offer paid previews to facilitate this demand for attention. While there is nothing wrong with paying people to create media around your product we do think that it is absolutely critical that it is clear when somebody is getting paid to make certain content. There are some examples of people being very non-transparent about which content of their content is paid for by publishers which, we think, in the long run, could damage board gaming as a whole.

As content creators that offer paid content ourselves, we have many discussions among ourselves how we should communicate paid content and luckily in the Netherlands, there is a social code put together by the RCC (Dutch organ for advertisement) and content creators how you should handle with these types of situations. We hope we are transparent when we have received games, when a comic is sponsored and what our deal with CoolStuffInc for additional comics entails. If you have any questions that are not covered by our FAQ, please let us know in the comments or message us when you feel privacy is needed.

To be clear, we do not accuse Stonemaier games of doing shady things, we hold Jamey Stegmaier in the highest regard and his blog is a treasure trove of information that is helping board gaming forward. We’re also not going to point fingers at creators saying they’re doing things wrong, we specifically drew ourselves in this comic taking bribe money to prevent accidentally making it look like somebody else. We do want to make sure people know that not every positive post, video or picture about a game is as spontaneous as you think it is and we hope that if you are a creator and are creating paid content you do everything possible to be upfront about it.

Speaking of paid content, time for some promotion!

In a little over two weeks, we’ll be at the UK Games Expo and we’re getting hyped about it. This year we want to experiment with selling signed prints of comics at cons! We’ve been giving away signed prints as prizes and people seem to be really enjoying them and others have asked if they could buy one, which is a great idea. For £10 you can have a print of your favorite comic signed by Rachel and handed by us personally to you at the expo. Because we can’t carry around our whole archive you do have to order your print before the 26th of May using this form. Once we’ve received the order we’ll contact you to decide on a time and place etc. If you don’t want a custom print, we still hope to meet you at the UKGE and talk about games. 🙂

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For some of you it might be time for the summer holiday! We will be leaving shortly which leaves us with a bit of a conundrum what we can create on such short notice. But we’ll surely be bringing some games to pass the time between the beautiful views and being stuck in a tent because of rainy days.

But being on vacation also means time away from the game collection which is a shame! We’ve started with our Near and Far campaign and are having a blast so far! Ryan and his crew have really delivered an immersive world full of super cool things and interesting choices. The game does come with lots of different components which is why we decided to create a laser cut insert with a very swanky character tray.

Speaking of people doing cool things for board games, this week there are three worthy causes for your money. First up is the campaign for the second African board gaming convention. Board game designer Kenechukwu Ogbuagu is raising money online so attendance can be free for visitors, promoting board gaming in Nigeria. We think this is a very cool way of organizing and funding a convention, so we wish him the best of luck and the visitors the greatest of times!

On the internet side of our hobby, Shut up and Sit Down and Rodney from Watch It Played are both doing campaigns to continue their work getting people excited about playing games! We’ve featured both in our comics and we’re long time fans, so we hope they keep doing the cool things that they do.

Spreading the joys of board games can also be done by lending games to friends and people (you trust not to bend cards). We currently have three games left by friends and will lend people games they want to try or play some more in their own time. While three games doesn’t quite make a board game kennel we do love taking care of other peoples games :).