So Very Wrong About Games

It is October, the month of Fat Bear Week, Decorative Gourd Season, Halloween, and Arkhipov Day! Sure, it has less candy than some of those other celebrations, but I'll wager neither a corpulent bear nor a kid dressed as a pirate has ever saved the entire human race.  01:00 AYURIS: IKI (Koota Yamada, Sorry We Are French, 2015) Games Played Last Week: 03:38 -Valka (Brooke Penrose, Terrible Games, 2...

Generally we here at SVWAG prefer sci-fi to fantasy, especially if it is of the general sort. There is something joyous about the weird flights of fancy that sci-fi can enable, such as Andromeda's Edge with its "Jelluloid Technoblorps." That said, there's something particularly odious about importing generic fantasy into your sci-fi, like space dwarves and space dragons--something Andromeda's Edge...

If you replayed all the published SVWAG episodes back-back, it would take over 355 hours, or almost 15 days. This is not necessarily how we would recommend you spend your time. Indeed, for our purposes, we are equally wrong regardless of whether anyone is there to hear it; while we sometimes engage with Western philosophy due to Mark's academic background, the realm of the koan is beyond our purvi...

I find so many mnemonics to be profoundly disappointing. Unless there's a structural element to tie the components together, a mnemonic will not serve to dispositively disambiguate a dyad.  I assure you, that lamentable bit of alliteration was unintentional. For example, "I before E except after C" also works qua slogan as "I after E except before C." There are the ones about beer and liquor, feed...

Solidarity, dear listeners, on this most august September Labour Day. Of course, Labour Day is the labour holiday invented for the US and Canada so as to undermine global solidarity. Nearly everywhere else celebrates International Workers' Day instead. One must marvel at the ingenuity of inventing Labour Day so as to undermine global labour solidarity.  02:29 AYURIS: Rolling Heights (John D. Clair...

Some important editorial notes! -the game walker mentioned is Völuspá, and no we don't know what work those accents are doing; -SVWAG does not engage in the eating of seal meat (no one's thought to offer, really); -we hope that Undaunted 2200: Callisto will follow in Battle of Britain's excellent example of having a badass Sikh pilot. Games Played Last Week: 01:02 -Nocturne (David Iezzi, Flatout G...

The full title of the Spider Lord is Spider the Third, by the Grace of God of the Unfinished Basement, Canada and His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Subterranean, Defender of the Faith. 01:56 AYURIS: Ginkgopolis (Xavier Georges, Pearl Games, 2012) Games Played Last Week: 05:02 -Knarr (Thomas Dupont, Bombyx, 2023) 08:12 -Primal: The Awakening (Tommaso Mondadori and Alberto Parisi, R...

It is Festivus once again here at SVWAG, where we shall once again vent our collective spleen over features of games that irk us. Sometimes we will assert that our umbrage is righteous and ought to be shared, and other times we will concede we are merely motivated by idiosyncratic pique. Our feelings, in either case, shall not be denied. 00:46 AYURIS: Beowulf: The Legend (Reiner Knizia, KOSMOS, 20...

Who is this Wilmot? What wares is he housing? Few answers are offered. We are merely told, rather imperiously, that we work at his warehouse. Sure, we have weekends off, but on occasion the fickle demiurge Wilmot commands us to speak in monosyllable, or move seats, or hide secrets from our colleagues. One shudders to imagine what terrible fate befalls those foolhardy enough to flout his edicts. Ga...

We here at SVWAG take pains to differentiate between two conflated ideas. We say "approachable" for rulesets that are easily learned and internalized, reserving the similar-sounding term "accessible" to refer to games that are usable for people with disabilities. Relatedly, MICHAEL WALKER IS BACK. 02:43 AYURIS: Oak (Wim Goossens, Game Brewer, 2022)   Games Played Last Week: 04:25 -Friday (Friedema...

Our guest host this week is the estimable Mark Besada of the Golden Geek Award-winning podcast, Board Game Barrage! Known as the Green Tank because he is more swole than the Hulk (rumours persist that Lou Ferrigno learned all he knew about bodybuilding from Mark), he nonetheless exudes generosity and hospitality.  Unless you throw down in Ghost Blitz, that is. Then it's Go Time.    Games Played La...

Our next guest host during Michael Walker's recovery is Efka Bladukas, half of No Pun Included! Efka is an internationally-renowned board game critic and dog enthusiast, known for his detestation of whimsy and tireless tolerance of Mark's yammerings. He once split a mountain in twain with his bare hands while simultaneously inventing cold fusion, but he's so humble he'll probably deny it--which is...

Our first guest host while Michael Walker is recovering is James de Moss, aka Jimbo! Many a human being has become lost in the deep recesses of Jimbo's sonorous voice, and thus one must take care lest you become consumed by his powerful charisma. Jimbo brings his extensive experience of digital board games, and board game adaptations, to SVWAG. 02:29 AYURIS: Planet Unknown Games Played Last Week:...

One of the under-appreciated virtues of an auction game is that each session can provide its own economy. While daunting to new players, who don't know what things might be worth, their flailing speculation actually helps determine what things are worth. If they buy that share of red for a squillion moneys, guess what, that is what that market would bear. At least for now, that is. Some jerk might...

While we pride ourselves on our internationalist focus here at SVWAG, we have been remiss in our multilingualism lately. While we reliably rendezvous with French on a semi-regular basis, a skosh of Japanese here and there, a quantum of Latin periodically, and whatever language AYURIS pretends to be, our Spanish could use some work. We thus devote ourselves to utter three whole words of Spanish in...

All I need to know about animal reproduction I learned from Uwe Rosenberg. I suspect many people have The Talk, which in my case was my father teaching me how to play Agricola. Navigating my twenties in utter ignorance wasn't easy, but now that Uwe has told me about the birds and the bees (and the sheep and the pigs and the cows) via Agricola I'm practically a biologist. 01:25 AYURIS: Dead Reckoni...

After a prolonged period where we have not discussed Kramer & Kiesling (the Kramer & Ulrich duo yielded El Grande, which we mention rather frequently), here we see a bumper krop of K&K kollaborations. The gibbons are fickle, and even the mighty Wolfgang and Michael must yield to their whims. But fortune (and apes) have at last smiled on them, and we revel in the classic Euro goodness as well as th...

In the vast panoply of human misfortunes, it is often fruitless to try to rank misery. Was historical tragedy X worse or better than atrocity Y? It seems callous to ask. That said, thanks to the applied research of a retired ethicist with the aid of Reiner Knizia's Zoo Vadis, we have conclusively discovered that it is better to be extorted by a marmoset than assaulted by an armadillo. Thus is huma...

Before the people of Quebec celebrated the Journée nationale des Patriotes (National Patriots' Day), they instead on the same day had the Fête de Dollard. A cynic might speculate that the timing of these holidays was chosen so as to pre-empt the English Canadian Victoria Day, and that cynic would be right. Games Played Last Week: 01:21 -Dice Flick (Rami Gaber, Pegasus Spiele, 2021)  04:49 -A Messa...

It is striking that no one submitted a question regarding the hues of our auras, so allow us to address the issue here and declare that amber is the colour of our energy. I regret nothing. 01:39 AYURIS: Capital Lux 2: Generations (Eilif Svensson & Kristian Amundsen Østby, Aporta Games, 2020) Games Played Last Week: 03:46 -G.I. JOE Deck-Building Game: Raise the Flagg Campaign Expansion (T.C. Petty...

There is only one novel and commendable Kant pun, delivered in the novel and commendable film Hedwig and the Angry Inch: "I got kicked out of university after delivering a brilliant lecture on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll, entitled, 'You, Kant, Always Get What You Want.'" 01:41 AYURIS: Mosaic: A Story of Civilization (Glenn Drover, Forbidden Games, 2022) Games Pla...

We are storytellers here at SVWAG. This week, we tell the stories of mismatched plagues with dead llamas posing as European dudes, of quixotic strivings for yet more skirmish games, of famous philosophers who hustled cards. Of course, if you wish to hear different stories, the power is yours! You have but to submit your questions for the upcoming Omnibus Questions episode, and all your idle demand...

No topic is off-limits for the upcoming return of our Omnibus Questions, as we demonstrate in this episode by tackling such issues as pre-Reformation papal indulgences. And if you were to guess which host brought up that little historical nugget, you'd be wrong! Possible questions: who would win in a street fight, J.G. Fichte or Nietzsche? Do sheep poop? Who is the best member of Team Avatar? (Fic...

While we have little experience with Ed Sullivan's TV offerings, his legacy is a fascinating one. While he capitulated to pressure during the Red Scare, he did show remarkable courage in platforming African American performers despite opposition from his sponsors. Quite surprising is that the illness that eventually killed him was kept a secret from him by his family, a practise that was already f...

It is said that both politics and religion are not good conversational fodder among people you don't know well (and perhaps not even for people with whom you are close), but sadly those are among Mark's favourite topics. The sun having been devoured may cause the astronomers to be delighted, but Mark knows a portent when he sees one, and he is confident some kind of sacrifice to appease violent sp...