Board Gamers Anonymous

How to Win Friends and Influence Gamers

Which board game do you bring to game night when you have one chance to make everyone say, “We need to play that again”? This week on Board Gamers Anonymous, Chris and Tim share games to win over children, families, non-gamers, experienced gamers, and heavy strategy fans.

In Voice of the Gamers, we explore games that make a lasting impression through eye-catching production, memorable gameplay, and the right experience for the right crowd. Whether you’re introducing friends to modern board games or impressing someone who’s played everything, choosing the right game can turn a casual gathering into a regular game night.

Crowdfunding Updates

Kickstarter — The Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit: A return to Middle-earth with a new tabletop adventure.

Gamefound — Defenders of the Realm: Definitive Edition: A refreshed edition of the cooperative fantasy game about heroes defending their realm against advancing enemy armies.

Roll for Preview

Chris — Stormlight: War for Roshar: A strategy board game bringing the conflicts of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive to the tabletop.

Chris — Lorenzo il Magnifico – A New Renaissance: A new take on Renaissance-era competition, building on the worker placement and engine building of Lorenzo il Magnifico.

Tim — On Call | A High-Octane ER Simulation Co-Op Board Game: A cooperative emergency-room simulation that challenges players to work together under pressure.

Roll for Review

Chris — Clash of Clans: The Epic Raid: Build your village, develop your army, and raid rival bases in this tabletop adaptation of the mobile game.

Tim — Kavango: Build a wildlife reserve in southern Africa, balancing animal conservation with the development of a thriving ecosystem.

What board game won over your friends or family?

Share your best game-night success story!

Visit Board Gamers Anonymous for more board game reviews, recommendations, and podcast episodes.

Enjoy the show? Support Board Gamers Anonymous on Patreon and help us keep the conversation rolling!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim’s Darkest Timeline: One Game Has to Go

Three great games. One has to disappear from Tim’s gaming options forever. And Chris has generously volunteered Tim to make every terrible decision.

This week on Voice of the Gamers, we put Tim through a gauntlet of impossible board game choices. Beloved classics, modern favorites, and games he thought were safe on his shelf suddenly face elimination. Will he sacrifice nostalgia? Betray his favorite mechanisms? Spend ten minutes arguing that the question is fundamentally unfair? Chris brings the choices, Tim brings the anguish, and everyone listening gets to judge him from the comfort of their own untouched collections.

In Roll for Preview, Chris explores Arctica, an Arctic ecosystem engine builder with gear-based player boards, while Tim dives into Oceanic, where marine life and habitats form a shared ocean ecosystem. Both are on crowdfunding—because apparently choosing which games to buy wasn’t stressful enough.

In Roll for Review, Chris looks beneath the greenery in Under the Leaves, a garden tile-placement game, while Tim heads down the rabbit hole with Rolling in Wonderland, a competitive dice-drafting adventure. After all those eliminations, Wonderland might actually feel reasonable.

Visit Board Gamers Anonymous for amazing tabletop content, more gaming discussions, and plenty of reasons to make room on your shelves.

Enjoy the show? Support Board Gamers Anonymous on Patreon to help keep the podcast rolling and fund Chris’s ongoing commitment to making Tim’s life unnecessarily difficult.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 592 – Never Play, but Never Purge!

It hasn’t hit the table in years. You can barely remember the rules. But suggest getting rid of it, and suddenly you’re prepared to defend that box like it contains a family heirloom.

This week, Chris and Tim tackle Never Play, but Never Purge! in our Voice of the Gamers feature: the games that don’t get played but will always have a home in our collections. From cherished memories and impossible-to-replace favorites to sprawling adventures waiting for the perfect group, we explore why a game’s value sometimes goes beyond its play count. Are we preserving a piece of our gaming history, holding onto the players we used to be, or keeping a seat open for the gamers we still hope to become? And exactly how many years can “we’ll play it someday” remain a credible argument?

In Roll for Preview, Chris heads to Middle-earth with The Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit, a reimagining of the beloved Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit that brings interconnected battles and the journey to Mount Doom to the tabletop. Tim answers the call of Defenders of the Realm: Definitive Edition, a return to cooperative fantasy adventure with a new gameplay engine, distinct defender decks, and enemies that require different approaches. Apparently, protecting our shelves wasn’t enough—we also need to protect entire kingdoms.

Then, in Roll for Review, Chris explores Minikin City, a strategic card game where building your city means balancing immediate rewards against scoring opportunities unlocked by its tiny inhabitants. Tim examines Mosaic: A Story of Civilization – Wars and Disasters, an expansion that adds naval units, military conflict, and disasters to your civilization-building ambitions. He also reviews Falling, James Ernest’s frantic real-time card game where everyone is plummeting, and victory means hitting the ground last. From building a tiny city to weathering civilization’s upheavals to delaying a very personal disaster, there’s plenty to discuss.

What’s the one game you never play but will never purge?

If you haven’t yet, check out the recently updated BGA website at www.boardgamersanonymous.com.

And if you enjoy the show, support Board Gamers Anonymous on Patreon at www.patreon.com/c/bga.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 591 – What If?! Tabletop Twists

What if one moment in tabletop gaming history had gone differently?

This week on Board Gamers Anonymous, Chris and Tim are messing with the timeline. In our Voice of the Gamers feature, we ask the tabletop questions that probably shouldn't be asked: What if a landmark game had never been published? What if a major designer had made a completely different choice? What if an influential publisher never existed? What if a convention never took off—or a game that changed the hobby had completely flopped?

Change one decision, remove one game, alter one moment…and suddenly the tabletop hobby we know today might look very different. We're pulling at the loose threads of gaming history to see what unravels, what takes its place, and whether we'd even recognize the hobby on the other side.

Roll for Preview

Chris checks out Bookwyrm: A Cozy Strategy Game of Beautiful Bookshelves, a cozy strategy game where book-hoarding dragons attempt to organize their overflowing collections, building and scoring bookshelves while inevitably being tempted to acquire even more books. Because apparently dragons and board gamers have exactly the same problem.

Tim previews Electrify, the upcoming engine-building game from AEG designed by John D. Clair and Ian Hutchison. Players develop an evolving energy industry across five revolving sectors, upgrading and chaining actions as they attempt to meet an increasingly power-hungry world's demands.

Roll for Review

Chris heads somewhere considerably less cozy with Enemies of Gotham City, a competitive area-control game that puts Batman's famous rogues—not the Caped Crusader—in the spotlight. Joker, Poison Ivy, Penguin, Two-Face, and the rest battle for control of Gotham while Batman and his allies attempt to ruin everyone's perfectly reasonable plans for criminal domination.

Tim reviews Dewan, a fast-playing competitive game of territory, placement, and hand management from designers Johannes Goupy and Yoann Levet. Players lead their tribes across a resource-scarce landscape, establishing camps, gathering resources, and completing story objectives along the way.

So join us as we review what's coming, what's hitting our tables—and then completely rewrite tabletop history.

Because every great game starts with "What if?" This week, we're asking what happens when the answer changes everything.

If you haven’t yet, check out the recently updated BGA website at www.boardgamersanonymous.com.

Be sure to connect with us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/boardgamersanonymous, on Bluesky at bsky.app/profile/bganonymous.bsky.social, and at www.boardgamersanonymous.com.

And if you enjoy the show, support Board Gamers Anonymous on Patreon at www.patreon.com/c/bga.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Board Game Red Flags: When We Know a Game Isn't for Us

We all have them: those little warning signs that make us look at a board game and immediately start planning our escape from the table.

This week, Chris and Tim break down their biggest board game red flags—the mechanisms, themes, design choices, components, and other telltale signs that can turn “Want to play this?” into a very quick “I’m good.” Maybe it’s a rulebook that looks like it requires continuing education credits. Maybe it’s a game proudly advertising 240 minutes of playtime. Maybe there are 47 different resources, an app requirement, player elimination, roll-and-move, or the dreaded phrase, “It gets really good after your first five plays.”

Of course, one gamer's red flag is another gamer's reason to immediately preorder the deluxe edition. Chris and Tim compare the warning signs that send them running, the ones they're willing to overlook, and those occasions when a game manages to overcome everything they normally hate. How well do we really know our own tastes—and how many great games have we avoided because they checked the wrong box?

Then it's time for Roll for Preview, as Chris and Tim take a look at some games coming to the table.

Chris: Food Chain Magnate: Special Edition takes Splotter's famously unforgiving heavy economic game of hiring employees, marketing burgers and pizza, manipulating demand, and ruthlessly outmaneuvering the competition and gives it the deluxe treatment, with completely redesigned artwork, upgraded components, miniatures, and a new presentation. It's still Food Chain Magnate underneath—just dressed like the CEO finally approved the capital-improvement budget.

Chris also previews Steam & Cheese, Alexander Rein's upcoming expert Euro from Skellig Games, in which steampunk mice operate an increasingly elaborate cheese-making industry. Players use dice as workers, with both their colors and values affecting their actions, while transforming milk into cheese, upgrading machinery, filling orders, and importing spices by zeppelin. Finally, someone had the courage to answer the question: “What if an economic Euro were extremely serious mechanically but populated entirely by mice obsessed with cheese?”

Tim: Catvale: The Board Game with Claws! sends rival cats into a modular, ever-changing world where they explore, gather resources, build, complete quests, and occasionally settle disagreements in the traditional feline manner: conflict. It's a strategic adventure-Euro hybrid built around a variable hex-tile world, dice-driven actions, and more than 100 adventure cards. Basically, cats finally get the sprawling civilization-building experience they always believed they deserved.

Then, in Roll for Review, we find out what Chris and Tim thought after actually getting games to the table.

Chris: Citadels Duel reimagines the classic Citadels specifically for two players. Rather than simply shrinking the original game, designers Guillaume Montiage and Manuel Rozoy rebuild its character powers, deduction, city building, and tactical interference into a dedicated head-to-head experience. Chris finds out whether all that scheming, bluffing, building, and backstabbing works when there's only one other person at the table to blame.

Tim: Nucleum, from Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi, is a heavyweight Euro set in an alternate-history 19th-century Saxony transformed by nuclear technology. Players develop networks, construct and power buildings, fulfill contracts, unlock asymmetric technologies, and compete to become the dominant industrial force. It's railroads, economics, technology, and uranium—which is either an irresistible Eurogame pitch or several of our red flags from the main topic combined into one box.

Tim also reviews Rauha, a 2–5 player game from Johannes Goupy and Théo Rivière about restoring life to once-sterile worlds. Players draft and place biome cards into their personal grids, create combinations, attract Divine Entities, and carefully position their Avatar to trigger rows and columns of increasingly satisfying effects. It's colorful, peaceful world-building on the surface, with plenty of combo-building decisions underneath.

So pull up a chair—but check the box for warning signs first—and join us as we figure out exactly what makes us say NOPE before the first turn even begins.

If you haven’t yet, check out the recently updated BGA website at www.boardgamersanonymous.com.

Be sure to connect with us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/boardgamersanonymous, on Bluesky at bsky.app/profile/bganonymous.bsky.social, and at www.boardgamersanonymous.com.

And if you enjoy the show, support Board Gamers Anonymous on Patreon at www.patreon.com/c/bga.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices