The Ascent of Board Games

It's February, and we're releasing a new episode, just as we planned to do several months ago. Speaking of planning things in advance, this month we're talking about programmed action games! Join us as...
We discuss a smartphone app for a very old game (with a very old-school website)
A discussion of Yaquinto's Album Games requires Frank and Brian to explain to the younglings what an "album" is...
We drool over Lego Super Robo Rally and River Dragons Giant and Mechs vs. Minions (which, contrary to what we say in the episode, is still available for $75!)
We have an interview with another game designer...but it's just Frank.
Joe creates a bizarre hybrid of two great game designers.
Apologies for Frank's audio - it sounds a bit like he's caught in a matter transference beam, but we promise he's fine.
A few other links to things we mention that you might find interesting:
The World War I Gotha bomber
Realmspeak, for all your Magic Realm automation needs
Baba Is You
As always, we appreciate your listening and would love to hear your comments on any or all of these items, 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!

Bonus episode time! The amazing Rob Daviau (@robdaviau on Twitter) returns to tell us about Return to Dark Tower, which will be live on Kickstarter on January 14 (less than a week away)! This promises to be an amazing, high-tech game combining two great design talents (Rob and Isaac Childress of Gloomhaven fame) with a substantial chunk of technological wizardry and a healthy dollop of nostalgia. Rob also drops a few tidbits about Pandemic Legacy: Season 3 (!) and Cthulhu: Death May Die as a bonus on top of your bonus, because we like you that much.
We apologize for the lousy sound quality here; we had a lot of technical issues getting the interview to record at all, and wound up going with about our fourth-choice solution. You can still hear all the good stuff, though. Make sure to swing by Restoration Games' website so you don't miss the Kickstarter when it goes live next week - this one is going to be a doozy!
And, as always, comments, questions, suggestions, and iTunes reviews are always appreciated!

Happy New Year! As we start 2020, we take some time to look back at our favorite games and gaming-related events, moments, trends, and other stuff.
Frank calls an item on Brian's list "the best game ever made"? (At least today.)
Jayson shares a story of gamers being excellent to each other (or at least to him).
Brian talks about a bunch of stuff, including Dicebreaker and Malifaux Third Edition.
Mike (of course) talks about Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Again.
Keep an eye out for some additional content over the next week or two - we each have some honorable mentions for 2019, and we'll also have another interview with Rob Daviau to talk about a very exciting new Kickstarter that will be launching shortly!
As always, we appreciate your listening and would love to hear your comments on any or all of these items, 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!

As the holidays draw near, it's time for a smaller and more intimate podcast crew (also because Mike and Jayson were both traveling). Sandi returns to help us discuss solitaire games, for those times when you are just sick of dealing with people.
We discover two engravings from the late 17th century that show the first evidence of a formal solitaire game. It's even older than Cracker Barrel!
The mere mention of Vlaada Chvatil's name renders us briefly incapable of saying words.
Sandi asks what Charles Darwin has to do with Robinson Crusoe. (Answer: islands, we think)
In return, we ask Sandi about the worst game Frank has ever made her play.
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!

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!