Meeple Like Us, October 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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Hello everyone! It is YOUR BOY MICHAEL here to sum up once again what's been going on in the world of board game accessibility, or at least that slice of it that is distinctively Meeple Like Us flavoured. It's been a month of ups and downs, to and fros, and one in which I've managed to get comparatively little gaming done. Never mind though - MLU posts are written as much as six months in advance and a little downtime here and there doesn't impact on our schedule. Still, it's hard not to be conscious that at the end of every week we're farther behind, in terms of percentage of all games analysed, than we were at the start.

Never mind all of that though! Let's go through our GREATEST HITS of the month - by which I mean, 'everything we published during the month'.

First of all, the games!

We began the month with our review of Yamatai and our accessibility teardown of the same. We then moved into talking about Wibbell++ both in terms of review and accessibility teardown of the same. We also did Blank's review and Blank's teardown, giving us a total of three games for 2017 covered in October. We're almost contemporary!

We also covered a game with which I have a complicated relationship - the venerable granddaddy of it all. Catan got a review and it also got a teardown in the traditional manner. Catan brings up mixed feelings in me, but they're almost all flavours of incoherent rage.

By far the best performing posts of the month though were two editorials. One was on gatekeeping in the hobby, both implicit and explicit. Responses varied from 'I'm so glad you posted this!' to 'Lol, this is absolutely not a real thing'. As ever, you can draw your own conclusions but as a general rule there are enough real issues out there to talk about that I rarely need to invent any. If there's a post about it, it's been something I've seen often enough and consistently enough to consider it worth a bit of attention.

The second editorial was a more spicy take on the ongoing issue of reviewers taking money from publishers for review content. It might be a small problem now, but that's what worries me about it - if we don't behave ethically when the sums involved are small, why should anyone trust reviewers when the sums get more substantial?

This week also got the nod from the Head of School at Robert Gordon University for us to put together a tabletop oriented event in Aberdeen sometime in May of 2018. Expect to hear a lot more about that as time goes by!