Meeple Like Us, December 2017

You can read more of my writing over at the Meeple Like Us blog, or the Textual Intercourse blog over at Epitaph Online.  You can some information about my research interests over at my personal homepage, or on my profile at Robert Gordon University.

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No more champagne, and the fireworks are through. Here we are, me and you - feeling lost and feeling blue.

But let's aim for a happy new year with our monthly roundup of all the Meeple Like Us content we've been throwing into your eye-holes in November of 2017!

As is often the case, our first post was a continuation of our coverage of a game from last month - in this case our accessibility teardown of Tsuro. We then followed that up with our review and teardown of the XCOM board game. That teardown post was particularly notable because it marks the first time Hayley Reid's behind-the-scenes work has really been given fair prominence on the site. Most of the notes regarding the app component are drawn from her work as a research intern working with me over the past couple of summers at Robert Gordon University.

We also looked at the excitingly stressful Pit Crew, posting a review and teardown in the usual fashion. We then covered Onitama and its accessibility. We finished off the year with our review of Ethnos and our teardown of the same.

We also put out two editorials this month - one was on the ethics of Amazon affiliation with regards to reviewers. I remain hugely conflicted on this although for the time being I will keep using them since what problems manifest only really come at levels of income far in excess of what I can boast, and even then a mindful reviewer can certainly compensate for any misaligned incentives. It's hard to deny though that there's genuine and fair cause for concern.

Biggest hit of the year though has been our top ten best board games, 2017 edition - while it's not exactly straightforward to count hits on that post since it was paginated, even looking at a fraction of the hits suggests this got a fair bit more traction than I expected.

Happy new year everyone - let's hope 2018 bucks with tradition and is better than the one that preceded it.