Meeple Like Us, February 2018

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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It is excitingly chilly here in Sunny Scotland! The Met Office are currently blaring out weather warnings that aren't so much nuggets of metereological information as they are previews for a gritty reboot of the Day After Tomorrow. What better time to recap the Meeple Like Us activities for the month? After all, who knows if we'll even be alive tomorrow.

Once again, a busy month! It scarcely seems like February can be the shortest of the year because we've got a bumper crop of links to harvest. First of all, we started off strong by publishing the accessibility teardown of our newest 'least accessible game' - Unlock. It's not quite a fair award to bestow, but I'm not quite a fair man so it all works out. We also took a look at The Resistance and its accessibility profile. We then explored the Exit series of escape rooms and found an accessibilty teardown that was only slightly better than Unlock. It's entirely possible that escape rooms will never thrive in this space but we'll find out for sure as time goes by.

We published our review and teardown of Last Will, or as I've come to think of it, 'Brewster's Millions the Board Game'. We also just this morning posted our review of the astonishingly innovative Fog of Love. Its teardown will come next month.

We've been especially busy though in the posts that don't form our regular highway of game coverage. First of all we published the Sinister Bottom quiz, which nobody has managed to get higher than 60% on so far. We did a review of the beautiful Tabletop Gaming Manual from Haynes, and we published a guest post from /u/stuffbybez on the accessibility work that went into Wibbell++. That one I hope to be the start of a regular stream of guest posts where designers plug their games in exchange for showing how seriously they took the topic of accessibility.

By far the biggest hit posts of the month though were our editorial on the New Boardgame Journalism and the associated New Game Journalism Reader. The first of these takes a concept Kieron Gillen popularised in 2004 and introduces it into the tabletop space. It's my hope that resurrecting this ancient idea will dramatically modernise board-game coverage. The second post goes over some examples of what I think of as first-rate game coverage and why I think the experiential angle they adopt deeply enriches the game discussion.

Oh, and we also published our first Monthly Roundup of great content from the boardgaming community. I even started running game nights at Robert Gordon University.

Crikey, it's no wonder I'm making no progress of note in Breath of the Wild.

See you all next month, assuming I survive the next few days of bitter cold, driving snow, and intermittent attacks from rampaging White Walkers.