Links: Game Genres as Music, Dice Tower Award Nominees & How to Decide What to Play

Links: Game Genres as Music, Dice Tower Award Nominees & How to Decide What to Play
• Not sure what to choose during game night? Perhaps this handy-dandy "How to Choose the Perfect Board Game" flow chart will allieviate your worries:

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(HT: That other Eric Martin)

• In a Tasty Minstrel Games newsletter, TMG's Michael Mindes writes, "I am doing an 'Ask Me Anything' on Reddit on Friday April 27th, 2012 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. PDT (GMT -7)... For those of you not on Reddit, this will be a discussion where I field questions from anybody and everybody that wants to ask one." I'll confess to being "not on Reddit" and my efforts to find an appropriate place to link to failed; I did, however, run across Asmadi Games' Chris Cieslik "ask me anything" post, so perhaps I'm just an old fuddie-duddie and not hep to what the youngsters are all doing these days. (Bonus EM reference: Reddit's general manger is named Erik Martin.)

• Can you compare board game genres to music? BGG user Martin G – full name presumably Erig Martin G – has done so in a blog post on BGG. I disagree with many of the classifications in the original post, but I suppose that's the magic of argument and differing points of view. Lots of fun comments in the thread, many of them way above my level of music knowledge (which consists mostly of how to search for bands on Pandora).

• Tom Vasel – whose name is nothing like "Eric Martin" – has posted nominees for the Dice Tower Gaming Awards, with nominees coming from games released in 2011. With A Few Acres of Snow on the nominee list for game of the year, I expect to hear more grumbling from Jesse Dean given his commentary on reviewer neglect in praising a broken game.

As an aside, and to put more "Eric Martin" in this Eric Martin-free item, I have now fully grasped the fact that I'm in no way a member of the Cult of the New, as I sometimes picture myself. Perhaps I was at some point, glomming onto new games every few weeks as I attempted to gain personal experience with every release and build a mental catalog of what's out there, but those days are clearly in the past as I've played precisely one of the games nominated for "game of the year" on the DTGA list and I have strong interest in playing only two of the remaining nine titles. Of the first 200 games out of nearly 1,000 items listed as 2011 releases on BGG, I've played 22 of them. Who knows? Maybe that 11% playing rate still pops me into Cult of the New status for some, but given the number of games being released, I don't see how it's physically possible to play a huge percentage of them – much less play them enough times to meaningfully get a handle on which ones rise above the rest. Maybe that's just me, though...

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