boardgaming in photos: Board Game Arena

Han, Allen and I kind of rediscovered BoardGameArena.com recently. We have played on BGA before, and we have played premium games too. When we wanted to play a premium game, one of us would just subscribe for a month, and the if the next month we were not playing, we would cancel the subscription. Now Han has subscribed to the premium service, and he has been initiating many games, some with all three of us, and some just two. That is why I have been blogging so much about games I've played on BGA. We play many new-to-us games, and also some that we have played before. We have been doing a lot of homework reading rulebooks. We need to do that because we now play in asynchronous mode. We don't arrange times to go online at the same time. We take our turns separately as and when we are online. Since we don't meet up for one of us to do the rules teaching, all of us need to read the rules and learn the game ourselves. 

We play some games we have played before, and for some of these which I didn't think much of before, I found new joy in them. My opinions shifted a little. Now whenever I turn on my laptop I feel a little excited. Is it my turn now? Although we don't meet online and we don't have any table talk, playing in this manner is like having pen pals. In case you need an explanation of what a pen pal is, click here. 

Ark Nova was a game I didn't think much of when I first played it. It is hugely popular, and I can see why, but I didn't find it all that amazing. It isn't anything particularly innovative. Now that I have played more on BGA, I find that it is joyful to play. It is satisfying to build my zoo step by step, and to complete one mission after another. 

For such a complex game, the user interface is done pretty well. I think they put a lot of effort in making it user-friendly. It makes the play experience enjoyable. I imagine playing such a game with so many components would be a major pain if the interface were poorly designed. 

This was my zoo. I was very lucky with my starting hand. I had four bird cards. Two had no prerequisites and could be played easily. The other two had prerequisites, but for one of the card the prerequisites would be fulfilled once I played the first two cards, and for the other card, the prerequisites would be fulfilled once I played the third card. This was a perfect line-up. Fate had a plan for me. I had to double check that I wasn't actually playing with any pre-set starting hand meant for new players. 

Han's zoo had many African animals.

The Castles of Burgundy is a modern classic which I've never quite agreed with regarding being a modern classic. It's decent but not amazing. It's just another Eurogame. From my recent play, I found myself liking it more than I expected. Not enough to make me want to buy a physical copy, but at least if someone suggests it I'd be more receptive now. 

I was quick to build all four of my castles (dark green). 

By game end, I completed my castle, ship and pasture spaces. 

One problem with playing on BGA is I don't have enough patience to read game rules properly. If there is a tutorial, I'd play it hurriedly and proceed to play the actual game, without paying much attention to the detailed rules or trying hard to remember them. BGA enforces rules and handles execution. The player just needs to make the decisions, and the decisions are presented as multiple choice buttons. Sometimes I just click without fully understanding all the implications, because I'm lazy to read up. That's not ideal, because it means I'm playing without fully appreciating the game. I miss out on some of the nuances. I think some games don't quite click with me not because the game isn't good, but because I don't spend enough effort to understand them. I may feel differently about them if I learn them properly. Maybe. However we keep trying different games and I don't have patience to go back to a game I don't find interesting the first time round. That's the tragedy of being spoilt for choice. 

I keep saying I'm not going to play solo Daybreak any more, and yet I still go back to playing it solo on BGA, because it's convenient. Now I only play at the highest difficulty, i.e. I draw two cards which make the game harder, one changing the starting condition, and the other augmenting the winning condition. Now that I have played the game more, I find that my win rate is no longer that close to 100%. With some of the harder variants, and if I get unlucky with my card draws, I will lose. Generally I still expect to win, but now that I have experienced that sense of danger, the game returns to become more interesting. One particularly hard scenario was starting the game with 0 resilience in all three areas. Normally you start with 1 in each area. 

Obsession is one of Julian's favourite games. I have played it before, and I felt it was fine but not spectacular. Now that I have played more on BGA, I find myself enjoying it more. I try to hold parties every round. My ideal is to keep collecting guests and rooms and to keep the parties going every round without pause. If I manage the work schedules of my workers well, I will fully utilise them and have enough hands every round. When guests attend parties, they get tired, and I need to do a reset before I can invite any of them again. However, if I keep making use of guests who introduce me to new friends, I can keep the parties going quite long before I run out of friends to invite and must do a reset. Now I love guests who have good connections and introduce me to more guests. This sounds like the BNI business networking that I do. 

See how many friends I have! This is like showing off your Facebook profile. It is fun to keep organising bigger and better parties, inviting more famous celebrities. This is why development games are attractive. People enjoy making progress. 

Han and I still play Ascension on the mobile phone. This one was rather extreme. He scored 148 points! Normally the final scores are around half that. This was an absolute slaughter. 

This is Star Realms. This too was extreme. When Han was down to 9 health, I had 102, a difference of close to 100. I had many Federation (blue) ships, and they often gave health. Gosh I've played so many games of Star Realms but I still don't use the proper terminology. 

I recently attended a business event at a cafe, and noticed that the cafe had a few games. Inuk was one of them.  I didn't play it. I just checked it out. This copy didn't have the rulebook, probably lost. However it was in generally good condition. I looked up BoardGameGeek.com afterwards, and found that it was a game about talking emotions. So this is the kind of game which is more activity than game. 

These are some of the cards. They seem to explore pretty deep and serious emotions like loneliness and trauma. Heavy stuff! 

Feedspot ranking: 48

 

A website called FeedSpot maintains rankings of blogs of various topics and categories. They have a boardgame blogs category. My blog is currently ranked #48. It's nice to be featured. For a long time I've felt blogging is rather outdated. People mostly watch videos now. It's nice to know there are still many blogs which are active. 

Dancing Queen on The Opinionated Gamers

The Opinionated Gamers (OG) is a blog I have been following for many years, since their inception in 2011. The team at OG was already writing for BoardGameGeek.com well before the OG blog started. They are old timers and long-time contributors to the hobby. 

A few months ago I contacted the founder and chief editor Dale Yu, and asked whether he was interested to give Dancing Queen a go. I sent a review copy to him in the US. This is what he thought of the game: link. He calls it a "super neat 2P card game". I must say I am thrilled. It is surreal to see my own game featured at a website I have been a reader of for so many years. 

Nithrania Game in a Nutshell Youtube channel

I recently discovered the Nithrania Youtube channel by Branislav Berec. He explains games in a series called Game in a Nutshell, and they are very well done. Clear, concise, professional, well-prepared, well-written, well-edited and very importantly, no rubbish rambling like what I see in many other boardgame explanation videos and boardgame review videos. I watched his explanation of Hallertau, the new Uwe Rosenburg game.  He deserves many more subscribers and I hope many other video makers learn to make videos like how he does them.   

geekgroup.app website

Do you use   boardgamegeek.com to keep track of games you own and games you play? If you do, check out this nifty website geekgroup.app. It extracts your data from BGG and presents it in many interesting ways. 

Try this link below. Replace the "hecose" part with your BGG username. 

https://geekgroup.app/users/hecose/insights/collection

What I enjoyed most was watching the evolution of my most played games. I started recording my plays in 2004. Watching 16 years of my own game play history was a sentimental moment. You can try it using this link below. Replace "hecose" with your own username. 

https://playback.geekgroup.app/hecose

69

There's a best boardgame websites voting going on at BoardGameLinks, and my blog is currently at #69. Go check it out. Please "like" my blog if you like my blog. :-) You may also find some interesting blogs / sites that you have not heard of before.

Happy Meeple

Nicolas from Happy Meeple contacted me about his online boardgaming website which focuses on quick and easy-to-learn games. The target audience is non-gamers and casual gamers. There are no rules to read. Instead the website provides tutorials to teach you how to play. So far there are already five games available, including Lost Cities, Finito! and Keltis. There is a resource collection and level-up system which determines how often you can play, how soon you can unlock certain games etc. This aspect feels like those free Facebook games and iPhone games which tries to keep you playing and persuades you to pay for in-game cash. However so far I have not seen any option to pay anywhere. This looks like a good website for an occasional quick game or two. The interface is clean and intuitive.

I have learned to play Finito!, which reminds me a little of Bingo. In Finito! you have much more control despite the luck element, and also a strategy does exist. However it is literally a multiplayer solitaire game, like FITS. So far my record against the AI's is 1 win 1 draw 3 lose, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. It's a nifty little filler.

In Finito! the objective is to arrange your pieces in ascending order. Initially all your pieces are face-down, and you turn three over. In the first half of the game, you roll a die to determine where to place one of your three active pieces. After that you randomly turn over another piece. You continue to do this until all pieces are on the board.

In the second half you roll the die to move your pieces. The die roll determines the destination, but you pick which piece to move.

The AI beat me again! I was only one move away. I needed to move #4.

one of the top sites

I only recently discovered that my boardgame blog has been listed as one of the top boardgame sites at Frugal Dad. Woohoo! It’s a long list with 33 entries, but still. Here’s how my blog was described:

"Sharing insightful reviews and analysis of a variety of different board games, Hiew’s Boardgame Blog lives up to its name. Each review includes detailed descriptions of the game and the instructions, as well as impressions from actual play. The comprehensive thoughts shared in each review help provide a clear picture of each specific game."

This list appears to have been made quite some time ago though. Some of the websites on the list are no longer active. BGG is not on the list, and I’m curious why. Anyhow, I am going to stick that fancy-looking logo on my sidebar.

11 Jan 2013: There link to Frugal Dad's list does not work anymore. It seems the page has been taken down, or they have done an overhaul to their website. Now I can only find their logo. I'm using this old logo because this was their logo when they released their top boardgame sites list.

blogroll

I recently added a blogroll to the side bar of this blog. I follow many blogs using Google Reader. I only recently found a way to easily export my subscription list into a widget, which I could then add to my side bar. If you are interested to look for some more boardgame blogs to follow, check out the blogroll.

16 Feb 2011 9:26pm. Oops... in case you are reading this on Facebook, the main location of my boardgame blog is at http://hiewandboardgames.blogspot.com

blogging in Chinese

One thing that I have been contemplating is whether to start a boardgame blog in Chinese. I am a Malaysian citizen, born in Malaysia and brought up in Malaysia, and I am an ethnic Chinese. In July 2010 I added a widget to this (English) boardgame blog, which let me keep count of how many visitors I get from each country. After having tracked the visitors breakdown by country for a while, I was a little surprised and also a little disappointed that the number of visitors from China (CN)- most populous country in the world - was very low. I didn't expect the number to be high, this being a blog in English, but I didn't expect it to be that low either. They have the same number of visitors as tiny Macau (MO)! I understand the number of visitors from USA may not be accurate, that some of them may actually come from other countries. I wonder how much the statistics are skewed by this.

A snapshot of my flag counter on 23 Nov 2010. This is about 4 months of data.

I have read that boardgames is booming in China, being a new hip pastime. Boardgame cafes have mushroomed. Games are getting licensed to be published in Chinese. There are games designed in China specifically targeting the local market. There are even pirated versions of boardgames. I have seen some when I visited Hong Kong recently. When the pirates are active in an industry, that means the industry is probably big enough to be lucrative for them. I'm not sure whether boardgames will be just a fad, but hopefully not.

I do get a decent number of visitors from Taiwan (TW) and Hong Kong (HK), where Chinese is the main language. Surprisingly they contribute more visitors than Australia (AU). Singapore (SG) is a country with mostly ethnic Chinese, but they all speak English, so it is not surprising that I get many visitors from Singapore. Also Singapore is a neighbour of Malaysia (MY), and for a few years in the 1950's we were one country.

Now why do I get this urge to do a blog in Chinese? In a nutshell, it's because I'm Chinese. I read and write Chinese. I grew up in a Mandarin-speaking family, and now that I have started a family of my own, I too speak Mandarin with my wife and my children. However I definitely read and write in English more than I do in Chinese. I only use English at work, I read mostly English novels, I visit English websites, I watch more English movies than in other languages, I play English versions of boardgames. But English is always a second language. I probably don't write in Chinese better than English, but I have a feeling that some things that I want to express are just better expressed in Chinese. I'm looking for a feeling of community of people who speak Mandarin as their mother tongue, in particular those who speak Malaysianised Mandarin, or maybe even Sabahan Mandarin (Sabah is a state in Malaysia where I come from).

I added this little widget not long ago, because I was wondering whether it would help to encourage Chinese-readers to read this blog. Then I tried it. Conclusion: machine translation is pretty bad. Go ahead and try it (top right of page).

There's no noble intention or grand objective about thinking of doing a Chinese boardgame blog, like promoting boardgames to the Chinese community (whether in China or otherwise), or providing information to Chinese people who are already boardgamers. If I do it, it's only because I enjoy writing. When I started this blog in 2007 I said that I expected to be updating it once every few months. What an understatement. It amuses me no end to read my first blog entry. I enjoy writing and expressing my thoughts, and I certainly feel very encouraged when there are others who enjoy reading my blog and find it useful or informative. So what's stopping me?

• A blog in Chinese will likely be mostly a translation of what I write here in this English blog. It doesn't sound so enticing when I think about having to repeat myself.
• I always think of boardgame terminology in English. I don't know the terms used in Chinese boardgame circles. I don't know most of the Chinese translation of game names. In some cases I think the names are translated different in different Chinese markets, e.g. Dominion is translated differently in Hong Kong and China. There will be some struggle to get used to using Chinese terminology, and to find out what commonly used terms are.
• Not sure whether I'll have time to keep up regular-enough updates.

China... the boardgame. Sorry, couldn't resist...

I have not entirely made up my mind whether to not do this, or to just give it a shot. I don't feel like starting something that I'm not confident enough to persevere in. I tried to look at what Chinese boardgame websites are out there, to see whether I would be adding any significant contribution if I were to start a Chinese blog. I didn't search for long, because after finding just a few of them, I realised that reading about boardgames in Chinese is quite tiring for me, because I am so used to reading about boardgames in English. I'm too used to the English terminology. Much of the content that I found could be found at English websites. There is some content about games designed in China, but I didn't find them very interesting. So I probably will not be reading about boardgames in Chinese much in the future. I only subscribed to the RSS feed of one of the websites, WanZhuoYou.

Here are some Chinese websites that I found. Any other good ones anyone can recommend?

• www.wanzhuoyou.com 玩桌游 (Playing Boardgames) - their tag line is "No.1 Professional Board Game Media in China"
• Jool Boardgame Club 小古桌上遊戲俱樂部 - their tag line is "2nd largest boardgame discussion forum in the Chinese-speaking world". I wonder who is the largest. Jool is from Taiwan. I remember I used to visit this forum when I first got into the hobby. I worked in Taiwan then.
• BGC桌游网 (BGC Boardgame Network) - This discussion forum seems pretty active.
• 桌游世界 (World of Boardgames) - Lots of information, including about boardgame cafes.

Now this, is one very long rambling post about something that I am trying to convince myself not to do.

analysing games, enjoying games

I read many boardgame blogs (using Google Reader, a wonderful, time-saving tool), and visit www.boardgamegeek.com almost every day. I read many game reviews. I have no doubt that I spend more time visiting boardgame websites and blogging about boardgames than actually playing games. Which is a bit sad. One thing that I have learnt from the many reviews reading and games playing is that you should not let others' negative opinions of a game impede your own enjoyment of that game.

The easiest example that most gamers can relate to is probably Monopoly. There was a time when it was trendy and cool to declare one's hatred of Monopoly at BoardGameGeek (well, perhaps it still is). I think many new gamers get brainwashed into thinking that Monopoly is a bad game. It isn't really that bad. And if you do enjoy it, why let others reduce your enjoyment of it, even if it really is a bad game? Axis & Allies is another example. Some people dismiss it as a "dice fest". I remember this was one phrase that struck me when I first got into the hobby. Why do some people feel so negative about Axis & Allies, a game which I thought was excellent? Why is this game ranked in the 200's (it was 2003)? Shouldn't this be top 10 material? Puerto Rico? (then #1 game) Never heard of it.

Some bloggers and reviewers are very enjoyable to read. Whether giving a positive or negative review of a game, they articulate their rationale very well and point out the strengths or weaknesses of the game. They do very good in-depth analyses of games and give thought-provoking opinions. E.g. Chris Farrell and Brian Bankler. Because of how well their arguments are worked out, I have been swayed by their opinions before, and I questioned whether some games that I liked were actually not that good afterall. They are probably right about the weaknesses of the games, but I later realised that these weaknesses may not be issues for me, or have not turned up in the games that I have played. So I should not have thought less of the games that I liked, only because other people, with different tastes and different tolerances for different flaws in games, have different opinions of these games.

There is some random screwage in the end-game of Power Grid, but I don't play it often enough (despite being a game I really like) to have this crop up. Through the Ages is called a massive accounting exercise, but I've never had so much fun doing accounting. Sometimes luck in card draw can make or break your game, but it never was an issue for the many games that I have played. Pandemic doesn't seem to be all that deep. Sometimes it feels like you'd lose no matter what you do, because you have very bad luck with the card draws. However, I still enjoy the game after more than 40 plays, and I can't even explain why. Now that I have the Pandemic: On the Brink expansion, I expect many more plays out of the game.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Some reviewers dissect games very well and expose all the flaws or the single paths to victory. Coke shipping (I think) is supposed to be the single most efficient way to win Le Havre. I read this somewhere. I have not tried it myself, and do not intend to. I have only played 11 games of Le Havre and have not found any game-breaking flaw myself. I intend to keep playing and enjoying the game, exploring the game myself. Maybe one day I will eventually see all the flaws and stop playing the game. For now I'll just be happy enjoying the game as a non-expert player.

This contradicts somewhat with one of my other views. I also think that to really enjoy a game, you need to be good at it, and play against others who are equally good. The game then becomes much more exciting and interesting. I guess what I am saying is you should have your own pace in exploring and improving yourself at a game. Games are about having fun, and ultimately not about winning at all costs. That's why I normally don't read strategy articles about games. I'd rather make mistakes and learn from them. It's much more fun figuring out strategies by yourself.

I now tell myself not to read reviews of games that I already own, especially if I like them. If it is a game that I don't like, I may still read a positive review, because it may tell me what I am missing. When there is so much to read on BGG, and so many new games to learn more about, the last thing you should do is feel bad about games you already own. And like.

what do jaded gamers look forward to?

I became a hobby gamer in around 2003-2004. My addiction to www.boardgamegeek.com started at that time too. Having been buying games, reading about games and playing games so much for the past 5 years, I sometimes find myself a little jaded, a little tired of recurring themes in games, recurring game mechanics, recurring arguments and complaints at BGG, recurring inside jokes. Quite often when I read game reviews, I just skip to the conclusion paragraph. If it sounds interesting, I go back to start at the beginning. Maybe it's information overload.

Many games get published every year, and there is a lot of information on the internet about them. However I find that it is becoming rarer and rarer that a new game would interest me. Sometimes just looking at a few pictures of a game and reading a few comments of it are enough to turn me off the game. I can't even muster the will to read a review. Don't even talk about going through the rules (which many game publishers now post onto the internet - a good thing). I'm probably being completely unfair to these games, not giving them a chance at all. Games like Royal Palace, Stone Age, Diamonds Club, A Castle for all Seasons, Finca. These are all mostly getting positive reviews, but I simply can't muster much interest. I probably sound like a Euro-bashing Ameritrasher. Even with new Ameritrash games, there aren't many that interest me either, and I don't name them here because I don't even remember their names.

Being picky about games is good for my wallet. However, despite this so-called jadedness, I still have a lot of games on my watchlist, and I don't think I will be able to meet my (probably too unrealistic) target of buying only 12 games in 2009. I'm already at 10 games bought. Maybe 20 is a more realistic target. Games that interest me usually satisfy one of these conditions:

1. ... has something unique - a mechanic, a theme, etc. Space Alert is a real-time and cooperative game. Tales of the Arabian Nights, a game where you build a story. Somehow, I don't really have a Friedemann Friese game hot on my watchlist at the moment, although he's famous for quirky themes. I do have Fauna in the lukewarm section of my watchlist, and, pardon my snobbishness, it was there before it got the Spiel des Jahres nomination.
2. ... is an expansion of a game I like. Race for the Galaxy: Rebel vs Imperium, 2nd expansion to my most played game. Keltis expansion - the one with the alternate board. There are many spin-offs of the Keltis brand, Reiner Knizia's first SdJ-winning game. Galaxy Trucker expansion. Tribune expansion. Pandemic: On the Brink.
3. ... is by a designer I like, and is of a type of game that I like. Automobile by Martin Wallace, which the designer himself likes a lot. However somehow his After the Flood and Waterloo do not interest me much. Le Havre by Uwe Rosenberg of Agricola fame, which I have already bought. I'm also watching his upcoming Gates of Loyang.
4. ... is something new to me. I'm thinking of getting into some simpler wargames, thus Conflict of Heroes. I have played two block wargames (admittedly probably at the easier end of the spectrum), Hammer of the Scots and Crusader Rex. Should I try Rommel in the Desert?

Chicago Express is a game that I'm interested in but can't quite categorise. It's sounds interesting to me, in that the rules are simple but their interaction is complex. This is a game that's quick but the decisions are tough.

I wonder how long these games will last until they gradually drop to the lukewarm or cold sections of my watchlist. My watchlist has more than 130 games, because I rarely delete games from it. They just gradually get downgraded. It's good to hold off buying games, because sometimes after waiting half a year or more, some games will become less interesting compared to when I first heard of them, and they will be downgraded. Less games to buy. Money saved. Newer games also tend to push older games down the list. So it's good to procrastinate.

Umm... I hope I'm not making anyone's wallet bleed more than it should by naming so many games here...

reading / writing more than playing

I spend more time reading and writing about games than I spend playing games. Is that sad? A little I guess. Sad because I don't get to play games as often as I'd like to. However at least I do enjoy reading and writing about games. Boardgamegeek, Boardgamenews, Fortress Ameritrash, Mikko Saari's Gameblog, ekted's Gamer's Mind, Mike Doyle's Art Play, Tao of Gaming and NYC Gamer are some of the websites I visit regularly. There is always something new to read about. It is almost a daily habit for me to visit boardgame related websites. It's not an addiction (at least I think so). I don't feel uncomfortable not to surf the internet for some time, but if it is convenient, then I'll do it everyday. It's as natural as breathing and eating. At Boardgamegeek I set "Notify me of new content" for some games which I am interested in, so whenever there are new reviews, articles, photos, etc about these games, I get a notification in my Boardgamegeek inbox. So I can rest assured I won't miss news about these games. For things like geeklists and general discussions which are not tied to any specific game, I will miss them if I don't visit Boardgamegeek frequently enough, but it is okay for me. This is an age of information overload, so it would be too tiring to try to keep up-to-date with everything. A hobby is supposed to be fun and not an obligation.

Recently I have been spending much time writing blog entries, because over my recent holidays I have been playing many new games. I started my boardgame blog for the convenience of making updates. It is much easier to use Blogspot than to manually create HTML pages and upload them. I had expected the frequency of my blog posts to be similar to my previous website updates. However the frequency increased, probably encouraged by the convenience, and also I find that I quite enjoy writing.

The first few months of my boardgame blog were mainly about covering different aspects of my boardgame hobby, my history, my preferences, types of games, etc. I also wrote about my boardgaming experiences, my boardgame sessions, and new games that I played. By now, I'm mostly writing about the sessions and the new games, doing mini reviews and sharing my thoughts. It will probably stay so from now on, with some different boardgame related topics occasionally if I can think of something interesting to write. One blog that I admire a lot is NYC Gamer. The posts are not frequent, but the quality is high. Most articles are interesting, deep and thoughtful. I don't think I have that many interesting things to say, but NYC Gamer is a good example to look up to.

My boardgame blog is mainly used as a record of my boardgame hobby. I like posting photos. I enjoy writing for the sake of writing. I think I will enjoy reading my own blog 10 years from now, maybe laughing at myself for doing such a thing as writing a boardgame blog.

So, what about playing games? At any time, if Michelle asks me, "Do you want to play a boardgame?", I will drop everything and play. Forget Boardgamegeek. Forget Blogspot. With two young children, it is not so easy to sit down to play boardgames frequently. When they are awake, they will come and make trouble. When they are asleep, we are sometimes already quite tired. I organise boardgame sessions on Saturdays, about twice a month, depending on Han's work schedule. Unfortunately since coming back to Malaysia in Dec 2004 / Jan 2005, I have not been able to develop a regular gaming group. So, it is still mostly just Han and I. Sometimes Michelle joins us. Sometimes Chee Seng joins us if he is back from Singapore. Sometimes we have other "guests stars", but those are infrequent. Maybe this year. We already have some potential new recruits.

I try to play as much as I can, and thankfully I also have Boardgamegeek and other websites, and blogging, to keep me happy and doing something related to boardgames.

audience

Today I visited a new blog about boardgames, Still Unpunched, by Oliver Harrison. Very good design and layout. And I was pleasantly surprised that my boardgame blog was actually one of the links on the front page. I am flattered. Well, I do hope I am writing something interesting for others to read. Another boardgame blog which has also listed my blog in its link section is Yehuda Berlinger's much more popular blog.