The Ascent of Board Games

Surprise! We're back with another random bonus episode, this one in honor of Black Friday (which, at least in the United States, is the day on which shoppers go out of their minds, retailers take out massive ads promoting tiny discounts, and the Christmas shopping season officially begins). In case you're doing any shopping, we wanted to suggest some games for the non-gamers in your life, to help you bring them into the fold. So in this episode we take a brief run through all of our previous episodes, and talk about what games in each category might be good choices for exposing new gamers to that kind of game. Then we round the whole thing out with some suggestions that don't quite fit into any of the episodes we've recorded so far.
Along the way:
Joe uses the words milieu and zeitgeist - both correctly, thank you very much - in the space of 20 seconds
Jayson introduces a game that's "functionally Yahtzee, but with violence"
Frank tells us about a game whose rules promote better living through chemistry
Mike gives us an unsolicited promo for After School Dice Club
We mention Target and Barnes & Noble so many times that they should really start sponsoring the show (call us!)
As always, we'd love it if you'd give us a review on iTunes - it's one of the very best ways for us to find new listeners.
If you have an opinion you'd like to share with us - and we know you do - please drop us a line via any (or all!) of the following methods:
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, THANK YOU ALL for listening!

Boo! Episode 16 is here a day early, because Halloween! To celebrate our favorite holiday, we play The Gothic Game, an extremely random game of murder and mayhem set in the Otranto Castle and Spa (try the deep-exfoliating moat!). It's a wild ride featuring dangerous snakes, bad prunes, Frank's wife Sandi, and a last-minute twist that determines the ultimate winner!
Because the game was relatively short (and also, let's be honest, maybe not the most exciting thing to listen to), we also included a discussion of some of our favorite creepy, crawly Halloweeny games, including several from Sandi's amazing collection of 1970s occult kids' games. Things mentioned this episode that you might want to check out on the interwebs:
The Kickstarter for the newly revamped version of The Gothic Game.
The tiny custom record player from Seance
The Kickstarter for Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood, which several of us are really excited about.
Jayson recreating his fate in the Gothic Game (spoilers!)
As always, we appreciate your listening and wold love to hear your comments on any or all of these sources, and especially a review on iTunes if you have the time and inclination!
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
Intro and outro music is "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
Thank you for listening!

It's Episode 15, Adventure Games, now complete in one file. It turns out that there wasn't quite as much material left for Part 2 as I thought, and also that I accidentally uploaded Part 1 as an unnecessarily large stereo file, so it seemed best to just replace the whole thing. Apologies to those of you who have already downloaded and listened to Part 1; you can skip to 1:03:39 to pick up with the new material.
This month:
Frank and Brian tell the younglings about the Dark Times.
We discuss the glories of 1970s string art. Yes, this was really a thing.
Frank wills a game into existence retroactively.
We introduce you to The Gothic Game, a charming little murderfest that has a new edition coming out soon, and also had a musical written for it once, which...well...how very.
We talk about Kingdom Death: Monster a lot.
NOTE: This episode is somewhat more NSFW than usual, because...well, because we talk about Kingdom Death: Monster a lot. And Dungeon Degenerates. And, er, Wikipedia. 
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
Intro and outro music is "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
Thank you for listening!

We're continuing our second year of podcasting - can we keep this up, or are we just pushing (or is it pressing?) our luck? Either way, we don't plan on stopping, so here's an episode of us discussing games in which you have to press and/or push your luck. In this episode:
We learn that the podcast feeds off of Brian's pain.
We introduce you to Feats and Fables, the D&D actual-play podcast that Joe and Mike are part of.
We discover that John Scarne (great card magician, author, and Paul Newman's stunt hands in The Sting) also designed some pretty interesting card games - and one really simple dice game.
We talk about Roll Or Don't, a nice online implementation of the classic game Can't Stop
We learn about Dread (shown here), a tabletop RPG with a boardgame inside!
Thank you for listening! As always, reviews on iTunes are a huge help for us, especially if there's a text review along with the rating. We'd love to get your opinions on our future episodes poll. And if you'd like to interact with us, you can do so at any or all of the following:
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
Intro and outro music is "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
Thank you for listening!

It's our anniversary - we've been doing this podcast thing for a whole year! To celebrate, we're doing an episode on legacy games, and as a special treat for you (and for us!), we are joined by a very special guest - Rob Daviau, the man behind the legacy game craze (and a lot of other great games besides)! In this episode:
Rob tells us about the original inspirations behind Risk Legacy, the person who knew that Pandemic Legacy would be a trilogy before Season 1 was even published, and the brand new Machi Koro Legacy, available right now at Gen Con!
We talk about some of Rob's non-Legacy games too, such as the forthcoming Return to Dark Tower!
Joe offers such thoughtful gaming insights as "If you lose, you don't win" and "At the end, there's one winner, and that person wins."
We learn how to play Six Degrees of Frank Branham.
We discover that, thanks to Joe, we've been playing legacy games all along.
Legacy games are susceptible to spoilers, but this is a spoiler-free episode. You can find some additional short files with spoiler content for various games here, but the main episode is safe for all (except for the occasional grownup word).
Also, there are some new options on the future episodes poll - please let us know what you'd like to hear us talk about!
Thank you for listening! As always, reviews on iTunes are a huge help for us, especially if there's a text review along with the rating. And if you'd like to interact with us, you can do so at any or all of the following:
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
Intro and outro music is "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
Thank you for listening!

Hello again, listeners! In Episode 12, we're talking about Hidden Teams games, sometimes referred to as Social Deduction games. Are you a werewolf, a cylon, a terrorist, a bad cop, The Thing From Another World, and/or Hitler? Doesn't matter to us, we're just glad you're listening. (Except for Hitler. That guy was really a jerk.) Join us as:
We learn about the Tibetan Memory Trick
Frank makes a gratuitous Kierkegaard reference
Mike uses "Zeitgeist" more or less correctly
Joe's role as resident game-hater is briefly usurped
Blood Bound undergoes a vast improvement in art (old cover vs. new cover)
Thank you for listening! As always, reviews on iTunes are a huge help for us, especially if there's a text review along with the rating. And if you'd like to interact with us, you can do so at any or all of the following:
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
Intro and outro music is "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
Thank you for listening!

Okay, now I'm awake enough to write some proper show notes. Episode 11 is all about "4X" games - games in which you Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate on your way to victory. The term originated in the world of computer games, but there are enough similarities - and enough interest on our poll (which you should totally go fill out if you haven't already) that we decided to do an episode on the subject. Join us as Mike experiences a temporal crisis, Brian totally fails to make the podcast more family-friendly, and Joe recaps the biggest rule-reading failure ever.
A few relevant pictures:
The classic (?) day-glo figures from the original Nexus Ops
A look at a Star Trek Ascendancy map to supplement our cryptic verbal description
Thank you for listening! As always, reviews on iTunes are a huge help for us, especially if there's a text review along with the rating. And if you'd like to interact with us, you can do so at any or all of the following:
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
Intro and outro music is "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
Thank you for listening!

It's time for Episode 10 of The Ascent of Board Games! But what could our latest topic be? Well, here are a few clues so you can deduce what the episode is about...
Steve Allen discussing his years on What's My Line?...
...and a clip from the show in which he encounters his long-time nemesis
A great overview (with puzzles!) of the legendary Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American
A board game cover that is definitely a product of its time
A set of files to help you investigate the mysterious terrorist group called Black Vienna
And a game board that hurts Jayson's brain
As always, thank you for listening. If you enjoy what we're doing, we'd also really appreciate a review on iTunes - they are a great way for the show to grow!
If you have an opinion you'd like to share with us - and we suspect you do - please drop us a line via any (or all!) of the following methods:
Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/
Intro and outro music is "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.
Thank you for listening!