Save vs. Rant

Today’s episode is all about the game SeaFall, a 4x inspired Legacy game by the ingenious designer Rob Daviua. Despite the fact that Daviua is a living legend, we at SVR do not recommend SeaFall. It is our opinion that the game has too many flaws to provide a game experience we feel is up to the standards to which one should reasonably be able to hold someone largely responsible for the #1 rated game on BoardGameGeek.com.

Since this is a Legacy game played as an unfolding campaign THIS ENTIRE EPISODE IS A SPOILER. If you intend to play SeaFall at some point, DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE.

Having said that, the remainder of this blog post is safe and will not contain spoilers about Seafall.

Continue reading “Episode 13 – Seafall”

Today at Save Vs. Rant, the story’s the thing as we discuss lore, and why it’s important even in everyday board games. Every game can have a story, whether that story is just an excuse for a game, or the game is just an excuse for a story.

Continue reading “Episode 12 – Lore”

Today at Save Vs. Rant, we’re going to be discussing math and logic, the building blocks of games! Remember: if you think you hate math but you like games, what you really don’t like is the presentation of the math, because all games are, at their core, math.

Continue reading “Episode 11 – Beautiful Math”

Today here at Save Vs. Rant, we hope to give you an introduction to DMing with 10 pieces of advice applicable to virtually any game. We call it – DMing 101!

Continue reading “Episode 10 – DMing 101”

Today’s topic is Games That Missed the Mark, wherein we discuss some games that we feel failed to live up to expectations.

Continue reading “Episode 9 – Missed the Mark”

Our topic today is Arkham Horror by Fantasy Flight Games, one of our favorite games of all time.

Continue reading “Episode 8 – Arkham Horror”

GenCon’s tagline is “The Best Four Days in Gaming,” and we here at Save Vs. Rant agree enthusiastically. As veterans of the convention, we were overjoyed to have the opportunity to attend the 50th anniversary of the iconic celebration of gaming culture! Today’s special podcast details our experience at the convention and some of the highlights of what we saw.

Continue reading “GenCon Special”

We have just gotten back from GenCon 2017, the 50th anniversary of the convention, so there’s not going to be a Save Vs. Rant this week. We will resume our normal release schedule starting next week. The convention was exhausting, but amazing, with tons of sights to see and things to do, and I highly recommend it to anyone with a strong interest in tabletop games.

Today’s topic is initiative, the determiner of turn order. For most games, initiative and turn taking is essential to ensuring that the game run smoothly, and in role playing games, it is very seldom as simple as going around the table in clockwise order.

Continue reading “Episode 7 – Initiative”

The struggle between good and evil remains one of the most common themes in fantasy literature. Since fantasy is the genre that defined the most popular roleplaying games, it should not be surprising that this conflict is frequently reflected in both the setting fluff and rules crunch of the games. Today, we tackle the topic of alignment systems in roleplaying games.

Continue reading “Episode 6 – I’m Chaotic Evil”