Board Game Barrage

Look, we know, we don't exactly help matters, but this hobby can be expensive. So, to make up for fueling your FOMO, we're gonna lay out some of the ways that we consciously try to curb our board gam…

We often talk about the burden of rules, and how in some of our favourite games, they just get out of the way. But when is that burden worthwhile; what makes the price of a heavy rules overhead worth…

Sometimes it's best not to know, right? You've just played a game, and you liked it a lot, but you're not quite sure whether that faction is quite balanced, or the designers accounted for that winnin…

Because making board games is hard, it's not enough just to have some solid mechanics - the best games have a production that coheres with the design. We look at some examples of games where producti…

Mark's trying to get us all into something he calls "sports", so as a compromise, we're doing a fantasy board game draft! We're going to pick games from the BoardGameGeek Top 100, until we each have …

We've got a couple of quick questions from listeners that we thought made for some fun talking points. We're trying to figure out what the board game equivalent of black licorice is, and  Before rust…

As longstanding experts on being cute, we thought we'd finally bring both of our fields of expertise to bear on one topic. It's a return to the classic top five list, and we're counting down the cute…

We played a double feature of legacy games for Cinco de Ocho Dos, which got us thinking about how our thoughts on legacy mechanics might have changed since the heady days of young Board Game Barrage.…

We talk about so many good games on this podcast, that it might seem like there aren't enough bad games to balance it out. There's a good reason we don't often play or talk about them, but maybe ever…

After last week's love-fest made us all uncomfortable, we had to get back to what do best, spirited in-fighting. To that end, we've devised three debates around the same core: is that often criticize…

We had so many fun ideas for this week that we couldn't settle on just one! It's always great getting topic suggestions from our listeners, but not all of them can make a full episode, so we figured …

We love Friedemann Friese, so much so that we're devoting a whole episode to the green-haired designer - a comprehensive look back at his contribution to the hobby, and how we've gotten on with his g…

We're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and with the exciting possibility of actually being able to play games together again, we cast our minds forward to all the wonderful games y…

Dan Hughes from Sporadically Board joins us to flip the podcast on its head. Now that we've spent a hundred and sixty seven episodes raving about board games, it's only fair that we discuss all the r…

As important as it is to talk about that which we have received, so must we mark the loss of the games whose time has passed. Board games leave our collections for many reasons, so we're going to rev…

Design often builds heavily on what has come before, but some designers, have made an art of iteration, taking their own beloved designs, and frequently reinventing them in new ways. We dig into this…

There are two good ways to create engagement in a board game: One is to let the player feel like they're achieving something constantly, the other is to keep them feeling like any wrong move could ta…

It's getting a bit too comfortable around here. Time to put stones in our shoes, tighten our belts, and get out of our comfort zones. We talk about the times that we've found ourselves in unfamiliar …

Wow! We asked for your top twenty lists, and boy did you deliver. We've crunched the numbers on the hundreds of submissions, and created what we think is the definitive list of BGB listeners' favouri…

We're seeing a lot more versions of games that are X: The Dice Game or Y: The Card Game. These are (usually) simplified takes on beloved classics, but often end up changing the feel of the game drama…