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.

November Writing Challenge Day 22: Court of the Dead: Mourners Call

I’m blogging every day this month. Some will be game-related, but this challenge is different than my most recent play-a-game-and-blog-about-it challenge. I’m writing a single post every day: no topic guidelines, with some posts being a collection of random thoughts. Click here to read yesterday’s post.

Thanks to the good people at The Op, I was able to play a pre-release copy of Court of the Dead: Mourners Call earlier this year (I also wrote about it for Geek & Sundry). It was a terrific game; basically, it’s a next-step Blood Rage. There’s this whole back story about the ongoing war between heaven-and-hell and how you’re trying to restore balance to the universe.

Sideshow Collectibles did an amazing job with the artwork and components. The cards are beautifully designed and check out the player board trackers in the photo above: they’re these cool skulls that fit right into the theme of the game.

Along with the box art and the rulebook, this is a fantasy game that reminds me of the summers I spent hanging out with my friend Dave. We were teenagers with nothing to do during the summertime except listen to heavy metal, play games, and talk about girls. It was a lifetime ago, but we’re still friends to this day and while we don’t really listen to heavy metal or talk about girls now, we recently started playing games again.

In fact, we played Blood Rage on his birthday this year and I’m looking forward to introducing him to Court of the Dead: Mourners Call. I’ve already got the soundtrack ready for our game.