The Opinionated Gamers

With the Nurnberg Toy Fair and the Spiel des Jahres in our rear view mirror, but the International Spieltage at Essen on the distant horizon, we’re squarely in the midst of the summer lull for new game releases.  A perfect opportunity to revisit some older games, which tend to get overshadowed here at Opinionated Gamers as we’re generally excited about and focused on whatever shiny new game has just hit the table.  With that in mind, I thought it would be a good time to rerun a handful of columns from a few years back that were originally published on the late Boardgame News website.  So each Friday in July and August I’ll dig one out of the archives and add it to this series for anyone interested in dusting off a game or two from the last decade, or maybe even the one before that.

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Every gamer I know looks to have an ideally sized game collection.  The subject is of enough interest that there are frequent threads on BoardGameGeek devoted to aspects of the subject.  The difficulty with such threads is that they almost inevitably come at the subject from the viewpoint of the writer, which might or might not match the viewpoint of the reader.  But collectively, there is a lot of good advice on these threads; it’s picking out the useful suggestions, and determining if they apply, which is the difficulty. Continue reading →

So, yesterday you  looked through two collections of games.  As some of you guessed, the first list was a snapshot of the 100 highest ranked games on BoardGameGeek (from June 2nd, if you’re curious).  The second list was a snapshot of the 100 most owned games (excluding expansions) from the same day.  (The 45 games which appeared on both lists were removed, so that the lists weren’t too long.)

So the question is – who is well served by the current ranking system? Continue reading →

Consider, for a minute, the following two collections of games:

Collection 1: Brass, Steam, Commands & Colors: Ancients, Paths of Glory, Age of Steam, Dominant Species, Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, Combat Commander: Europe, Goa, War of the Ring Collector’s Edition, Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game, Runewars, Crokinole, Imperial, Here I Stand, Die Macher, Age of Empires III, Chaos in the Old World, Hansa Teutonica, Endeavor, Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear! Russia 1941-1942, Advanced Squad Leader, YINSH, Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, Troyes, Claustrophobia, Space Alert, Blood Bowl: Living RuleBook, Wallenstein, Imperial 2030, Navegador, Hammer of the Scots, Struggle of Empires, Napoleon’s Triumph, Dune, Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, Railways of the World, Indonesia, The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, In the Year of the Dragon, Amun-Re, Cosmic Encounter, Taj Mahal, Space Hulk (3rd edition), Conflict of Heroes: Storms of Steel! Kursk 1943, Up Front, Notre Dame, Merchants & Marauders, Cyclades, London, Automobile, 1830, Warhammer: Invasion, Antiquity, Ticket to Ride: Märklin Edition Continue reading →