Blog
Guild
Archives
Contact

Mark Johnson's occasional & opinionated podcast about family strategy boardgames

Monday, November 29, 2010

BGTG 111 - Post BGGcon (with Greg Pettit) [second try]



I'm posting this show again to get the correct version in the RSS/iTunes feed. (An earlier posting of this show erroneously copied an earlier episode.) Sorry for the trouble.

-Mark

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Show #111 is now fixed. Please try again.

For the first hours after it was posted today, the latest podcast episode had a glitch that meant subscribers were getting a repeat of the previous episode #110. A couple astute listeners brought that to my attention, and I was able to quickly fix it. If you're one of those that got the wrong episode, try redownloading. (In iTunes, I got it to work be deleting the duplicate show, the un- and re-subscribing to the feed. Then it downloaded the correct version, the one with Greg Pettit talking about  BGGcon and new Essen titles.)

BGTG 111 - Post BGGcon (with Greg Pettit)



After my annual "Essen anticipation" show, perhaps it's only natural that some listeners ask me for a post-Essen show where I can share my opinions about the new games after I've played them. The only trouble is that it will take me some months to get all of those plays in, since I didn't go to Essen myself and haven't hardly had any chance to play (or even see) the new games. Here in the US, the best chance to play all of those games--and quickly, right after they're released at Essen--is to go to BGGcon in Dallas, Texas, hosted by our friends at Boardgamegeek. And while I didn't manage to go there, either, I have good friends who did. One of them, Greg Pettit, took some notes and then was happy to discuss his impressions with me for this podcast episode. As you can see from the list below, Greg managed to play lots of the new titles we're curious about.

You may prefer to follow along to the discussion with this "read-along" geeklist showing all of the games Greg played.
In the podcast I briefly mention another gamer's post-BGGcon impressions. That's the excellent report from Tom Rosen in his column at Boardgamenews. Check it out for another perspective, sometimes similar, sometimes different than Greg's. Finally, you can still review the Geekbuzz results from BGGcon, or other reports tagged from that event.

-Mark

Monday, November 15, 2010

BGTG 110 - All About the Easy Play games (with David Arnott)



At long last, another "All About" show, the format in which a guest and I talk through a particular game in great detail. This time we tried something a little different, discussing the entire series of fast-playing games in small, square boxes called Easy Play by German publisher Schmidt Spiele. Since we covered so many games in this episode, this is one of my longest shows ever, nearly two hours. I'd posted a question about that on Facebook/Twitter beforehand, and the answer was for me to put the show out as-is, not breaking it up into multiple episodes. Feedback is welcomed.

The Easy Play series consists of
Only some of the games have been published in English, but most can be purchased by gamers intent on finding them. Dave & I have played them all, and discuss our impressions of them. We naturally talk about some other titles by way of comparison. Finally, we briefly discuss (speculate, really) on the new Easy Play Kids line of MauseSause, Rakete, and Tipi.


-Mark

Saturday, November 06, 2010

All of BGTG's archives are up!

At long last I've managed to make all of Boardgames To Go's five and a half year podcast archive available on iTunes! They've always been available through this blog, but the process was cumbersome (at best). Now by getting all of the shows into the main podcast feed, podcast accumulators like iTunes (the 900-lb gorilla), iPodder, Podtrapper, Zune, etc. should all have the entire back catalog of BGTG.

My recent attempts to do this had met with failure until yesterday, and in the process I know some folks subscriptions stopped working. Hopefully that's all been repaired automatically, but if you're still having trouble try un- and re-subscribing again.

I can tell the new feed is working for most people, because my download stats have skyrocketed in the past 24 hours! My daily download average is about 500 when a new show is first posted, curiously maintaining at 100 downloads per day even when there's no new show. Over time, that means most episodes get about 2500 downloads. Is that my audience? I guess so. (I wonder what The Spiel, The Dice Tower, and GG&G get these days. Probably lots more--good for them!) However, now I've had nearly 5000 downloads in the past day. The largest downloads are for the most recent show, but there's a "long tail" of recent downloads for episodes going waaaaay back into the archive. On Monday I'll post an announcement on BGG and then I'll probably get some more.


-Mark