An everyman gaming podcast
Today’s episode is about Kingdom Death: Monster, a cooperative boutique nightmare horror miniatures game. This is our mostly spoiler free episode. describing the game play, theme, and controversies surrounding this game.
Continue reading “Episode 23 – Kingdom Death: Monster Part 1”
Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’re discussing RPG rules we really like – rules that can make good games great as well as rules that make unique game systems unforgettable.
Today’s episode of Save Vs. Rant is about bad house rules – non-canonical rules introduced to a game by a well-meaning group that end up making the game worse.
The focus of today’s episode is how to ease newcomers to the tabletop board gaming hobby. When the average person thinks of “board games” and “card games,” they tend to think of the family game night games that everyone remembers with varying degrees of fondness (often completely unrelated to how enjoyable the games themselves were). Relating games back to these familiar touchstones makes it substantially easier to introduce newcomers to the hobby.
Today’s episode is about complexity creep, of which the making of this episode was an example. When we set out to do this episode, we planned to go over only a few specific examples, but the subject proved much richer than initially expected.
Today, we talk about Sentinels of the Multiverse by Greater Than Games, one of our favorite co-op card game experiences!
Design philosophy changes with time. You can see this in advertising, in clothing style, in food (consider the truly incredible inedible Jell-O nightmares of the 1950’s) and, most pertinent to this podcast and its blog, in gaming. In today’s Save Vs. Rant, we’re going to break down the differences between the Old School and New School approach to RPG gameplay and design.
Today on Save Vs. Rant, we want to discuss something that will hopefully be valuable information with all the upcoming (and ongoing) gift-giving holidays: casual games. Casual games are not only a huge part of the story of tabletop gaming, but an awesome way to introduce people to the hobby!
Continue reading “Episode 16 – Getting Serious About Casual Games”
On today’s episode of Save Vs. Rant, we delve into the theory of fun itself. What makes things fun? How can we understand fun on a deeper level? Why are two completely different things both enjoyable even though they may share virtually nothing in common? Find out, when we discuss Eight Flavors of Fun!
Game designer Marc LeBlanc previously had a website at www.8kindsoffun.com, which seems to be down at the time of this writing. This is a shame because it had a lot of good information. You can still find a snapshot of it on the Internet Archive.
Today’s episode is about two examples of poor characterization: the Mary Sue and Pants. Mary Sue being a reference to a very old Star Trek parody fanfiction, and Pants being a reference to the Oatmeal’s less than flattering review of the Twilight series.
Spoilers start at 09:05 and continue to 10:59 for Curse of Strahd, and 10:59 to 12:45 for (minor) Wrath of the Righteous spoilers!