Really Happy I tried this out again.  We didn't have the best faction make up, but the Vagabond won right before my turn (which I would have won on) and two turns in front of the WA (which would have won on their next turn).

I rolled a ton of 0's against the WA, woof!

Anyway, I definitely think we should get a game together sometime for this.  It's becoming easier to manage the more I play on TTS and Tabletopia.

Finally, as I said with #Clans of Caledonia, this was so much better with everyone being able to jump into Discord and chat.

Congrats again @JamesReid860!

I'm sure some of you are surprised to see this so here's some context. We ran a giveaway on gleam about a month ago to take a poll on great games to play over zoom. The first winner I had picked didn't respond within the 48 hour limit, so I had to select another winner. As I stared at the wheel turning and turning, I hoped that it would be from someone at BGA, and what do you know, I see James' face! lol

Hope you enjoy the game James! :)

I haven't been around here for a while and so much has changed... Congratulations on the progress!

I see that games now have scores and you can sort games by popularity. How are those scores calculated? And are they available via the API?

Cheers and keep up the good work!

When you are using the search bar, you'll see game names get put into the autocomplete, before the change you'd select it and it'd do a search with that term to show all the results. It seems clear that if you're clicking a term you want to see that specific game so now it'll jump straight to the game page now.

An issue we saw as a potential problem was having ratings always show even if there's only 1 for a game. It could easily influence others in their own ratings so now they will hide until there's more than 5 ratings for a game so that a small average will show.

I've just launched a new feature that allows users to vote for complexity ratings. It's similar to the "weight" feature on BGG but on Board Game Atlas we break it down as 2 ratings.

1. Learning Complexity
2. Strategy Complexity

This allows for a better understanding of what makes the game easy or difficult.

We talk a lot about our favorite games or ones on our shelf of opportunity (or shame). But what are the games in your collection that you have played once but NEED to play again... whether it was because you weren't so sure if you liked it on the first play or you loved it and haven't gotten it back to the table? 

I've gone through and reimagined the look and feel of the game page based on some other websites that I like better and I'm really much more pleased with the way the information is laid out. It more naturally shows the important information of the game on both desktop and mobile by grouping things. Before everything was chaotically in boxes everywhere and now things are collected together in a, hopefully, more understandable way.

Please leave your feedback I really want this to be an amazing page to understand more about and interact with your favorite games.

This came up on another Post I had started about What needs a second play in your collection. Some games seemed to be designed with depth in mind that needs many plays to really mine those depths. The pros are tons of replay-ability and satisfying game play. However, the cons is that you need to have time and a group who will play the game over and over to get to those depths. Many times, these games seem to not be the ones that are "love at first play" (unless these are the style of game you are into). 

There also seem to be a group of games that are designed to be engaging from the start, are easy to learn and teach and fun to plays. All pros to this style. They seemed to be designed for the gamer who plays a game once or twice and is on to the next hot game. But the cons are that they seem to "fall flat" after multiple plays and they either aren't as satisfying or are easily "solved". 

Obviously these aren't the only two ways that games are designed and there can be a game that has mix of both. Also the same game might have lots of replay-ability with one game group and feel flat to another so there is some subjective personal preference here. 

So all that being said, do you find that you gravitate toward one or the other in your collection? Both? Do you look for one kind of game or another when you're deciding which ones to buy? 

I've run into a couple times where I make a forum post and want to re-word my title. However, when I select the edit post function, it only allows me to change the description and not the title as well. Am I missing an option to edit the title? 

Is there a game out there that you wish you could try? One that perhaps you don’t own, or you don’t have the proper game group for, or whatever other reason you can think of? I’ll share mine in the comments. 

If you're interested in kickstarter games you can check out their game page to see their funding status and also see the most popular reward level that people are backing it at!

So, yesterday I asked y'all to introduce yourselves. Today, I am asking you, what is your favorite game and why?

I did a post like this some months ago, but there have been a lot of new users I have been seeing since then. So, I am just dropping this post to give you the chance to introduce yourself in the comments. You can include as much or as little information as you wish.

I'll drop mine in the comments.

Assuming August or September is the most likely date a game night could potentially happen...or could everyone will need to be tested in my vacuum sealed entryway...

1.  Tomesaga playthrough: I am looking forward to the arrival of Viscounts and hope to host a long gamenight including dinner to play through the entire series.  Architects before dinner, Paladins after, and Viscounts into the evening with a Light Beer, Cheese Board, Imperial Beer theme to pair with each game. (We might have to start at lunch actually).

2.  A full 7 player Scythe playthrough.  Still haven't gotten 7 to the table for Scythe.  This would be a great post apocalypse game to play.  

3.  If very small groups of 4-5 are allowed together before the un-quarantining, I think a game of Heaven & Ale during which you can wager a roll of toilet paper one per turn in place of paying a coin.  At the end of the game, the toilet paper is divided between all players with ratio being based on the position of your master brewer.

I'm working on an article and the data I'm collecting has been so compelling to look at that I thought I'd share with you all here. I'm hoping to finish it up and publish it early this week, but I wanted to let everyone know on the secret before it gets seen by a much wider audience.

This is showing the trend of page views on #The King's Dilemma before and after Shut Up and Sit Down's glowing review of the game. I have similar charts gathered up for each of their game reviews/spotlights in 2020, and will be highlighting their impact on number of views on the game page, while also pointing out which games had their stamp for "SU&SD Recommends," and also how wide of a target audience these games have.

I hope you'll find the article interesting!

Thanks to Board Game Atlas, I recently received the new #Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North. I got to play it a couple of times this week, so here I am with my first impressions! Keep in mind that I have only played twice, and this game has a LOT more to offer, and a lot more discover.

I'll post some pics in the comments below!

Quick Overview

Empires of the North is a card-focused tableau and engine builder in which players control different clans vying to build the greatest empire. Each clan has a different personality, and a dedicated deck to match! Some clans love to pillage and conquer, and some love to drink!

The game is played in rounds in which players draw cards, place cards (locations) in their empire, and go sailing on expeditions to pillage and conquer both nearby and distant islands. Once familiar with all of the available actions, turns are simple, as you basically do one thing per turn. While the turns are simple, the strategy isn't necessarily obvious. In each round you're able to take as many actions as you want and as your resources and workers allow, so you're trying to set up a tableau of locations that combos well together and allows you to keep taking actions and scoring points. This can lead to some really satisfying, high-scoring rounds if you set yourself up right!

The main actions you can take are:

• Build a Location (put a card in your empire). Some of these are fields, which provide resources, and some are locations that provide you with actions you can take on your turn by "exhausting" the card, and paying the cost of that action, if any.
• Take an action from the action wheel(?) using one of your action pawns. There are 5 of these - Explore (draw a card), Populate (gain a worker), Harvest (gather resources from 1 of your fields), Construct (build a Location without paying its resources), and Sail (put a ship on the expedition board).
• Pass. When you are finished with the actions you can/want to do for the round, you pass, and any other players can keep taking actions as long as they can.

After the action phase, you resolve the "Expedition" phase, in which anyone who "Sailed" in the previous phase will either Pillage (discard for immediate resources/points) or Conquer (add to their empire for later access to the actions) a "Nearby" or "Distant" island.

And that's it! During the following Cleanup phase, you simply reset your exhausted cards, regain your workers, remove your action pawns from the action wheel, and do another round! The game end is triggered when someone reaches 25 points during the Action phase.

What I like so far:

• Art - the art is great! Every clan has a distinct look, and it's all fun and cute!
• Components - the resource tokens are nice wooden tokens, and not just cubes or cardboard tokens. The coins and ax tokens are cardboard, but that's it!
• Insert - this insert is fantastic. The components are stored in a removable tray that you just put in the middle of the table. So nice. It makes setup that much faster. There's room for expansion decks, and sleeved cards. I'm definitely impressed.
• Gameplay - wow this game is really fun! It's a bit of a puzzle to try to set up an engine that will score you big points in the later rounds. I've only played twice - once with my wife and once solo - and I've used two different clans. Learning the strengths of each clan will be a ton of fun! The rulebook gives a quick overview of each clan, but that doesn't help much in figuring out how to play it.

What is just okay:

• Rulebook - a couple of things with this. The paper quality is lower than I'm used to seeing in...most board games. The art in the rulebook is beautiful like the rest of the game, but the paper feels cheap. Not linen, not even glossy paper, just cheap paper. That doesn't affect gameplay at all, it just felt odd considering how much love was put into the rest of the game.
  The contents of the rulebook are easy to follow. The only issue I had there was a few times when I was unclear on how something should be played out, and I had to spend a couple of minutes searching the rulebook to find an answer. So in that sense, it felt like the rulebook didn't have the best layout/ordering.

What I don't like so far:

• Nothing! I've only got 2 plays in, but so far I'm loving this game, and look forward to getting it to the table often!

I spent about 2 hours re-imagining the game page and how we display the information for each of the games with @philryuh. I've gone through and made a lot of the easiest changes but more will be coming this week like Game Complexity and a Big visual update to the Forum and other sections.

I am working on a design for Edo's Stuck at Home design contest and was hoping for some feedback on the title. I asked this question in the Love Thy Nerd Facebook group and narrowed down the choices here to the most popular ones. 

Simple Farm - supposed to be an homage to the old computer game Sim Farm but makes the game sound too simple I think

Agrinomics - on the other hand is a good descriptor of the game but makes it sound heavier than it is. 

I just posted this morning on reddit with some of the big updates I did in the last few months and a user pointed out how they were still waiting on adding notes to games in their lists. I thought I might as well just make that feature now so it's live! Go to your lists and you can add in notes to any games you like. All the notes are currently private but I'd like to know whether or not you'd like to have them shared publicly.