The Ascent of Board Games

Happy New Year! In Episode 6, we talk about paragraph games, a topic near and dear to several of our hearts. Learn about the game that Frank thinks is better than Star Saga (gasp!), the game that might be Joe's favorite of all time, and the game that Mike calls "the Dark Souls of paragraph games."
If you're interested in playing (British) Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series on your PC or phone, turn to page 17.
If you want to play the classic Lone Wolf choose-your-own-adventure books online for free, turn to page 6.
If you want to hear Joe butcher several Polish game designers' names - we're all very, very sorry - fast-forward to 1:01:10.
If you'd like to see Frank's beautifully-painted Stuffed Fables miniatures, turn to page 12.
If you would be kind enough to give us a review on iTunes, turn to page 42.
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/
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!

Merry Christmas (or other seasonal holiday(s) as appropriate to your personal preferences and/or belief system)! Our regularly-scheduled episode will be posted as usual on January 1, but we wanted to talk about our thoughts on The Year That Was, so you get a special bonus episode. (You're welcome.) We discuss our Top 5 game-related things of the year (which may be games, game-related events, game trends, or anything else that we can somehow tangentially connect to board games), our biggest disappointments of the year, and what we're looking forward to in 2019.
For some more details about some of the stuff we discuss in this episode:
Here are Part 1 and Part 2 of Dinesh Vatvani's interesting data analysis of BGG game ratings.
The epic Eldritch Horror case our friend Sean got from Lyris Laser.
You thought Jayson was kidding about his Transformers collection? Not even a little bit.
Mike's still streaming his video game adventures. Check him out on Twitch.
It's been a great year for us - thank you for listening! (Also, if Frank has talked YOU into buying something during this podcast, please let us know so we can update his score appropriately.) If you have anything you'd like to ask, share, or tell us about, 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.
We'll talk to you again next year!

It's us again! This month, we're working together on some cooperative games, including some obscure oldies, some new surprises, and some hall-of-fame classics (which we TOTALLY didn't forget any of until we were in the middle of recording the episode). As usual, we start with a bit of a ramble about what we've been playing (or at least buying) lately; if you want to skip that, the main topic of the show starts at 18:24.
A few of the fascinating things we learned this episode:
We clearly need to record an episode on asymmetrical games soon
At least 40% of the podcast team gets "asymmetrical" confused with "asynchronous"
Frank uses Gamepedia to organize his ludicrous boardgame collection (though most of us still suspect the mysterious hooded monks)
Buddy the Frog was really excited to visit the Family Pastimes HQ
Japanese schoolgirls were really excited to play Zombie Tower 3D (there's no sound for the first ~30 seconds of the video, so don't worry)
In the spirit of cooperation, please feel free to share our podcast with people who you think might enjoy it. If you have the time to give us a review on iTunes, it really helps us in our efforts to reach more listeners. And if there's stuff you'd like us to do more of, or less of, or differently, please let us know! We're still a small enough operation that we can adapt easily to what our listeners want to hear.
If you have an opinion - 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/
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!

Welcome back! This month, we're rolling out some dice games - specifically, games that do interesting or unusual things with dice (rather than just another Yahtzee clone). It's less of an evolutionary timeline and more of a random walk, but we hope you'll like it anyway. Some of us were a little tired during the recording of this episode, so if we sound a little punchy or slurred towards the end of the episode, it's not because we were drinking. Promise.
We start with a recap of games played at a recent game convention we all attended. (Note that "recent" is a relative term - this episode was actually recorded in early July. That said, we're more or less done with our initial backlog of recordings, so future episodes should be a lot more current.) If you want to skip all that nonsense, the episode proper starts at 18:01.
The interesting board/base of Das Spiel, which is hard to describe in audio: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/93615/spiel
As always, we'd love to hear what you think - is there too much random chatter when we talk about what we've been playing? Have we forgotten your favorite games in a particular genre? Why does Mike hate gnomes, and why is he wrong? If you have an opinion - 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/
And if you have the time to give us a review on iTunes, it really helps us in our efforts to reach more listeners. The other thing that really helps is word of mouth, so if you know any other game nerds that might enjoy the show, please tell them about it!
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!
 

Welcome back! This month's topic is "Batteries Included" - board games with electronic elements (or, in some early cases, electrical elements) that are an essential part of the game. We had a few audio issues this time around, so I apologize for the sometimes uneven sound quality; I promise we'll have it back under control next time!
Here are a few links to some "extras" you'll hear us mention along the way:
The epic Egyptian imagery of Electra, 1910: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/598808/electra
A great Dark Tower fan site, with pictures of Bob Pepper's fantastic artwork for Dark Tower (and Dragonmaster): http://well-of-souls.com/tower/
Orson Welles assaults the Dark Tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrY7MWEkwE
The Nightmare 2 music video - don't say you weren't warned! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9ad5JXTnFE
A sample of how Dropmix can work, since we utterly failed to record any of our own experiments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcQs1FJuJ1U
We also include a brief digression on which miniatures game has the most difficult miniatures to assemble. However, we did edit out our 18-minute digression on the relative merits of Community and Rick & Morty. Maybe we'll put that on our Patreon site someday. You know, if we ever actually have a Patreon site.
The other thing we cut is a 10-minute discussion of the Weave role-playing game. It's certainly in keeping with the theme of the episode, but since Weave is an RPG rather than a board game, we thought it was something we could safely leave out of the main episode (especially since this one was already a bit longer than usual). That said, if you're interested in hearing it, let us know; we'd be glad to release it as a supplemental "expansion pack" mini-episode.
As usual, we'd love to hear what you think - 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/
And if you have the time to give us a review on iTunes, it would really help us in our efforts to reach more listeners.
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!

Just in time for Dragon*Con, or PAX West, or the NOVA Open, or just a long holiday weekend of board games, it's The Ascent of Board Games - Episode 2! (And they said it would never happen again...)
This month we're talking about one-versus-many games, wherein one player smashes a bottle against the bar and says, "C'mon, I'll take on all of you at once!" (Metaphorically, in most cases.) I think we were all a bit surprised at how far back this type of game goes; hopefully you'll enjoy listening to what we learned.
As usual, we'd love to hear what you think - 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/ (for some reason, Facebook won't allow "/ascentofboardgames")
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames (likewise, "ascentofboardgames" is too long for a Twitter username. Sigh.)
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com (click and bookmark it!)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/ (this one is fine. Yay Instagram!)
And if you have the time to give us a review on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ascent-of-board-games/id1420342842), it would really help us in our efforts to reach more listeners.
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!

Welcome to our podcast! We're a bunch of Atlanta-area nerds that like talking about board games almost as much as we like playing them. Our stated mission is to talk about how board game mechanics and concepts have evolved over the years...but really, we just like talking about games. (And picking on each other.)
This first episode may sound a bit stiff - it's actually our second time recording it, since audio errors ate the first one - but please don't hold that against us!
We're starting out on a monthly release schedule, and may try to step that up to every two weeks if we get a groove going and people like us.
We'd love to hear what you think - please drop us a line via any (or all!) of the following methods:
Website: https://ascentofboardgames.podbean.com/
Email: ascentofboardgames@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ascentboardgames/ (for some reason, Facebook won't allow "/ascentofboardgames")
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascentofgames (likewise, "ascentofboardgames" is too long for a Twitter username. Sigh.)
Discord: http://discord.ascentofboardgames.com (click and bookmark it!)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ascentofboardgames/ (this one is fine. Yay Instagram!)
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!