board games

Instagram Live: Abandon All Artichokes

I did a live chat with Emma Larkins, the designer of Abandon All Artichokes, over on Instagram (replay below). It was fun learning about the development of her family-style deck-building game. And tonight I’m playing Abandon All Artichokes with my family as we continue our Facebook Live at Five series of gaming streams.

Meepleville Live Stream

Thanks to Timm Metivier and Grant over at Meepleville – Board Game Cafe for having me on their weekly live stream on Wednesday! It was fun playing the first iteration of Stonemaier Games’s Rolling Realms and talking about our top three games that need a sequel. Meepleville represents the best of the gaming community and they’re providing a wonderful digital space for people to connect. It’s great to see they’re open for curbside pickup and I’m looking forward to the day I can visit Meepleville again. (Fast forward to 1:37:00 to see our top three lists)

One Whole Month of Live Streaming

I didn’t expect to live stream a game every day for 31 days straight. Then again, I didn’t expect a pandemic to change the world seemingly overnight.

Thanks to my family for live streaming with me since March 18th. Every day at 5pm Pacific we went Live at Five and played a different game on Facebook Live. Here’s the one we did tonight for On Tour, which you can play along with if you have your own score sheet (you can download one here). We did this as a way to stay connected with our family and friends, and as an added bonus it gave all of us a nice bit of structure to our daily lives as we got through the first month of the Stay at Home order.

We’re taking a break this weekend, but we’re not done. Season two of our Live at Five live streams begins on Monday!

2020 American Tabletop Awards

I said it in my Facebook post this morning, but I’d like to reiterate it here: I’m honored to be a part of the American Tabletop Awards committee. Over the last year we discussed lots of games, finally narrowing down our choices in the four categories before we had our winners. The board game industry continues to put out a lot of quality games and these 20 games (four winners, eight recommended, eight nominated) are the best of the best.