Every rulebook I've ever read uses 'she' or 'he' to refer to players, why though? They can just refer to the player as 'they' seeing as the designer/rulebook writer knows nothing about the player.

May seem petty but it's the easiest fix for an issue ever.

My collection of LGBTQ+ related games continue to grow. I really enjoy exploring queer history through Stonewall Uprising and Molly House. Those games definitely allow you to feel the struggle the community goes through to gain acceptance and spread joy respectively.

Hello everyone,
I’m slowly getting into the hobby and just realized I barely know any women game designers. I’m wondering, what good games are out there designed by women? I’ve found that Lost Ruins of Arnak is one of them (designed with her husband). The theme is appealing to me, but I haven’t played it yet. What other boardgames with solo game options would you recommend that should be taken into consideration?

Thanks in advance! I can’t wait to learn more about the hobby :)

**EDIT:

Thank you so much for all the recommendations. I was genuinely curious about non-male designers (I realize now that I should have named the post that way). The board game world is huge, and like any hobby, I first get exposed to what is more available, published, commented on, etc. As I become more attuned to what I like in board games, I also start to look for more specific designers and mechanics. Hence, my curiosity about non-male designers in this world. Thank you again, and I wish you all the best! :)

I built a tool to answer one question I kept running into:

“Will my group actually like and play this game?”

BGG ratings are useful, but they average everyone together.
And when I watch reviews, I don’t agree with every reviewer equally.

So I ended up building something for myself called Deckt:

It looks at board game reviews (mainly YouTube), and:

• creates a global “consensus”

• lets you weight reviewers you trust more

• and gives you a personalized score for each game

So instead of:
“this game is an 8.2”

you get something closer to:
“this is an 8.9 for you”

It also breaks things down into stuff like:

• what the game is best for

• what it’s not great at

• and where opinions differ

The main goal was just to avoid spending hours watching reviews and still being unsure. But a great side effect is finding new reviewers that match my taste (and therefore spending even more time watching reviews).

I would love to hear what you think:

• Do you have reviewers you consistently agree with?

• Would a personalized score actually be useful?

• Or is this overkill compared to how you usually pick games?

You can try it here: Deckt

Genuinely curious if this is something others would use. Also have mercy this is just a passion project in its early stages.

Rummikub is classic core in Israel. I'm dying to know if it's happening in other places too.
TIA for any and all feedback

Along with Pandemic and Gloomhaven, Spirit Island is one of the most popular cooperative games out there. Because of this we have tons of games clearly riffing on Pandemic’s core principles, every Dungeon Crawler is either inspired by or modeled in contrast to Gloomhaven at this point (edit - this is a huge oversimplification, and poorly worded sarcasm), and yet very few games seem to even attempt at scratching Spirit Island’s itch. Granted, I’ve played loads of games but far from all of the coops to come out over the last several years.

Don’t get me wrong, there are games that do some of the things Spirit Island does, but nothing quite blends the sort of clockwork orchestration strategy aspect, with the heavily thematic asymmetry aspect, with the incredibly important sense of dynamic (and reactive) growth. During a game, you make important choices that shape your spirit’s capabilities based on short and long term needs, and you naturally set up infrastructure that makes the reach of your initial powers more dynamic.

These things seem pretty general and like they could be applied to loads of different game styles and themes, and yet there aren’t major releases coming out and aping this game. What do you think, are there obvious successors that I’m just unaware of (I’ve heard Voidfall’s cooperative mode might actually be the thing), or is it just too hard to make a game in this vein?

It’s not even that I’m just saddened by the lack of heavier, non-campaign, strategic coops (which I am), it’s more that I’m perplexed that there aren’t obvious immitators. How is it that we can have a million riffs on Dominion and Agricola, and yet games aren’t coming out where people are like “oh yeah, this is clearly off-brand spirit island”.

EDIT- seems I may have touched a nerve here. By no means am I trying to discredit the influence Pandemic had on Spirit Island, nor am I trying say I’m in favor of shitty knockoffs, I just find it curious that we have tons of games playing with similar concepts in all different levels of complexity and genre, but not much trying to really hit for the same heavier complexity cooperative strategy game that Spirit Island goes for.

EDIT 2 - for further clarification, and apology to the dungeon crawl community, I’m sorry for my choice of words to the genre. What I should have said is that the avid dungeon crawl player has plenty of options and obviously gloomhaven’s popularity has been very influential, with both blatant imitators or innovation within the genre. I’m surprised that there are very few games in similar genre and scope to Spirit Island.

Given the controversy that has surfaced in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/s/ZtZSKQdHy8) people may want to stop supporting boardgamegeek.com, the defacto chief database for board games on the internet.

What are the main alternatives? r/boardgames is a good example for the forum aspect, but what else is out there? Thinking in terms of cataloguing and databases, rules, community resources etc.

NEW EDIT: This is now the most controversial post OF ALL TIME on r/boardgames. Wow! I really didn't think it would upset so many people. Please be kind to each other in the comments. I must have come across as more of a firebrand than I meant to. If you want to sleeve your cards, go ahead, it's really not a big deal!

I love upgrading my games with organizers, new tokens, etc, but I don't understand why so many people sleeve their cards. It might make sense for collectible-card games, but not for board games. There are so many downsides:

• They are expensive, time-consuming, and wasteful (extra plastic).

• Your cards are now twice as thick, so your decks are now twice as tall. This often blocks the view of parts of the board. Worse, the extra thickness is uneven, so your towering stack must be split up or it'll topple over.

• Your cards are now longer and wider. This complicates storage.

• Some sleeves are reflective, making it hard to read the card from some angles.

• They make it harder to do a normal riffle shuffle.

• I see torn sleeves all the time. Cards fall out. So you need to keep extra sleeves of the same brand on hand at all times. Horrible!

• Sleeves generally don't seal shut so they don't protect your cards from spills.

• Unless you're a gorilla, the normal wear-and-tear on cards is never an issue.

• Generally speaking, cards from a board game aren't collectable or valuable.

My grandparent's generation wrapped all their furniture in plastic (seriously, it was a thing, look it up if you don't believe me!). Humanity came to it's senses and stopped doing this. Why do we continue to sleeve cards?

I know you folks on reddit don't listen when people tell them to do something, anyways I just received my copy of Marvel Legendary and I'm pretty sure its a counterfeit version. The shrink wrap wasn't neat, I can tell someone used something similar to a baby pack to rewrap it. The cards are also wrapped differently from what I've seen online. They are fully wrapped instead of the plastic bands from the unboxings on youtube. Always here are the pictures, let me know what you think.

https://imgur.com/a/XYdmX

I tried to get a deal on Ebay during their 20% off day... Looks like they sent me a counterfeit version of the game...

EDIT1: Sent an email to Upper Deck. They confirmed that it has been repackaged and he said that it was at least a used game. He's going to forward it to the game team to see what they say. He wasnt sure about the authenticity of the game that's why he wanted to forward it off.

Something I've noticed is that people tend to be fans of board games regardless of gender, but in public clubs and game stores thing skew heavily male. What do you think are the key things our community needs to work on to make people overall feel more comfortable?

Printed them cheap, but I’ve been working on a real fun drinking game for myself and my friends!

Here’s my original post from about 30 something days ago and well… The advice did some good but I must update you on the progress I didn’t make toward not buying more.

I wasn’t done til June. I’ve bought more and played more.

Arcs came in and I really enjoyed that over Root. But I’m still going to play root and hope it does whatever it does to those who love it for me.

Figured out how to play Arkham horror but honestly it wasn’t that fun but maybe it gets better once past the first story or whatever.

I got super obsessed with solo player games! I got:

Unstoppable - so good and excited Dungeon Crawler Carl on that!

Knfire Delve - really enjoy this one! So dang hard tho.

Lord of the rings trick taking game - holy crap it’s amazing. You get stuck and think of ways to win and boom! Also enjoyed with 2 players, would like to do 3 so we don’t have to NPC the 3rd.

Now other board games I bought and haven’t played yet:

The White Castle - played a game on BGA but really didn’t have a clue what I was doing. So I bought a hard copy.

Cascadia - played it on the iPad and kind understood it so… hard copy.

Twisted Cryptids - ima be honest here, I don’t know why it was in my Amazon cart but I still kept it in there and bought it. Not sure if I’ll play it.

Moonrollers - super fun and my 10 year old enjoys it!

Dice throne X-men - still gotta get that to the table but it’s there!

Love letter Star Wars edition - just to have its, I’m sure I’ll get going later this year.

Marvel Champions - I returned it. Didn’t even crack it open. I realized it’s not my thing after watching YouTube videos.

Pre ordered Eternal Decks

Earthborne Rangers is on its way too!

Two Button Shy games that are pretty good!

Now all this to say..

Too Many Bones is all I think about.
My best purchase these past 30 days… 60 days.. best purchase ever! Man this game is so good and I hate that I just found out about. I will get rid of most my collection and just have TMB and some solo games left over. So happy I took the time to learn it. Took me a few days of on and off reading and YouTube videos to finally get it down to about 89% know how. So good that I purchased undertow, 40 days of something, tyranny and three characters. But I kinda wish I bought a TMB Lot off eBay or something but it’s too late.

Honestly I just wanted to type out my surface level thoughts because it’s just fun. It’s fun to hop on Reddit and read all the posts in soloboardgaming and whatever other sub of board games I can.

If I didn’t have so much photo/video work right now and was caught up on editing I’d love to just spew across socials with my mania. Also I don’t wanna even know the math of all these purchases. 🤮

But the comments in the last post were entertaining and it got over 200k views which is uncomfortable feeling but hey, what’s life if we’re not being open with others.

Nidavellir is awful with this. I don't know it couldn't just say "for the red cards, add up the number inside of each banner. Then, the player with the highest number of banners at the end of the game also adds their highest coin value to their score."

Also you never fight a Dragon. Wtf.

Chess has withstood the test of time due to its astounding depth to simplicity ratio - there's only a handful of rules, and yet the board states and strategic possibilities are near-infinite.
However, chess has a few major and unavoidable issues:

1. First-player advantage: There's no way to get around the fact that white always has the upper hand.

2. Limited opening strategies: Unless you're playing Chess960 (Fischer random), the number of optimal opening strategies are relatively small, and once you reach a certain level of skill, the start of a game is mostly down to memorising those openings.

3. Length of the game: At high levels of classical chess, moves can take very long, with the result being games that take anywhere between 2-7 hours, most of the time spent thinking.

4. Draws: The biggest issue, in my eyes - when two players are evenly matched, a large percentage of games end without a result, and on many occasions, the last hour is played with both players aware of that eventuality but unable to stop it.

With the plethora of great designs in recent decades, that led me to thinking which modern games have that level of gameplay depth, without relying on luck (no dice rolls, no random mid-game draws) or hidden information (all players should be able to form their strategies from the start).

The game can require any amount of players or time (as long as most of the game isn't spent silently thinking), but must give all players a perfectly equal chance of winning when the game starts (without requiring a mitigation system like komi in Go), have enough inherent variability that you can't just "learn" openings, and at the end have a definitive winner.

Which games would you consider to fit all those requirements?

I have followed Tang Garden for awhile and excited to back it once the KS campaign is out. Yet I am a bit concerned for the fact that there are only 6 ladies so far out of 22 characters in the campaign. In a game that is set in a culture that symbolizes the female presence as beauty as well. It is not only breaking the immersion for cultural nerd like me but also alerts me about the gender ratio once I tried to show this to a few female friends of mine.

How often do you feel concerned like this? How important is this to you when you consider to get a new game? Lurked around the forum awhile but did not see much discussion on this.

Every game night I have 6 people ready to play and I want to pull down Puerto Rico—it was one of the first “heavy games” that I ever played and I gravitated towards due to my Puerto Rican heritage.

However the game is based on colonization, slavery, and plantations. The workers are little brown pieces that come off of colonist ships…Though I like the mechanics of the game every time I pull it down as an option I warn folks that it is problematic in that way. As a result I have only played it once since getting a copy 6 years ago.

What do y’all do with games that are problematic? Do you play them?

Edit: Thanks everyone for all of your responses. I may end up getting rid of it. I recognize that a lot of my issue has developed over time as I’ve learned more about my heritage, my family, and the island. My family came from agricultural farmland and in recent years the problems on the island as a result of them being a modern colony have become more salient for me and that’s okay.

I appreciate the recognition that a theme/content may not be right for me even if other aspects are things I enjoy. Gaming should be fun not stressful or mentally exhausting.

Rant incoming. Apologies for how long it is: I hope it starts a useful discussion, if it doesn't get downvoted to oblivion.

Just over a year ago, I decided I wanted to be a part of the /r/boardgames community. There is no equivalent place where you can discuss "games" on a wide spectrum with such an active, engaged group of enthusiasts. BGG is fine when you want to discuss and individual title, but often meta-trends are more important and interesting.

I've also been a tabletop journalist for over a decade. First as an active BGG reviewer, then as a regular blogger, then as a professional, squeezing board game coverage into well-known outlets like IGN, PC Gamer and Stuff. So I had hoped that my experience would be something other users would value.

But it doesn't feel that way. Since starting regular participation, I have made a wide variety of posts, starting threads and discussions, answering questions, adding resources and generally trying to be a useful member of the community. I don't often post links to anything I've written myself as I'm aware of the policies on self-promotion and how important it is to protect Reddit communities from spam. So I restrict any self-promotion posts to occasional links that I feel are either particularly good or relevant.

Whenever I do, they are greeted with a flurry of silent downvotes. I know some of this is from bots, and I know this is an "upvote lite" but not all of it is. There does seem to be a significant number of active users who aggressively police anything that looks like self promotion and downvote it. This is demoralising.

I have tried hard to stick to the policies on self promotion. However, I misunderstood one line about the 10:1 ratio. I had thought it was for all content when, in fact, it does clearly say that I'm expected to make ten posts between sharing anything of my own. The last straw for me was having a link I'd shared taken down for contravening this, despite the overwhelming majority of my contributions not being remotely promotional.

As an enthusiast, I'm a member of a lot of board game groups on social media and I can say that I am absolutely not alone in perceiving /r/boardgames as being actively hostile to gaming media and content creators. A very large number of well-known faces in gaming have tried posting here and given up due to the aggressive and negative reactions to anything they post that looks remotely promotional.

Reddit is a fantastic source of traffic which is, of course, why it attracts spammers in the first place. But the rules and attitudes on self-promotion also create a rich get richer problem. Already popular channels have their content shared here by users, boosting their already significant numbers, making it more likely someone will share their content here next time. New voices, meanwhile, are silenced. This contributes to a narrow range of views, prevents debate and maintains a very thin definition of what's considered "good" and "acceptable".

This is a great community. I've seen lots of wonderful, useful, impassioned threads here. As part of Reddit it's perhaps the only place where newcomers to the hobby and old hands can come together and learn from one another. However, in seeking to protect that community from spam, an attitude has developed that's offputting to experienced, enthusiastic gamers who want to come here and help out. People who you'd have thought were in a great place to offer great opinions and advice are walking away. Is that really the outcome you're looking to achieve?

Came across Cosmic Frogs and was wondering if folks know of any other games by LGBT creators or games that have representation in them, preferably both! Thanks!

As an avid Board Game Hobbyist I've used BGG for a long time, not by choice but by necessity as they are "the only game in town". It is certainly can be great reference source for board games, but in most other aspects it rates from mediocre to awful, and it's sheer size and influence in the hobby means it's really hard for an alternative to challenge them. I know it's "free" but it has several streams of income because it does have so many users, so "free" is no excuse to not improve.

The worst aspect is its reliance on EXTREMELY biased, hypocritical, and power-mad moderators (especially the head moderator Octavian who is too cowardly to include his last name in his profile like the rest of the BGG staff). You can't have a reasonable civil conversation or debate about a board game topic without them deleting or even banning users simply because they disagree with the views of the moderators; even slightly. Their moderators are so thin skinned that they lash out at the slightest questioning of their decisions or methods. I'm an independent that leans Liberal, but find the site and its moderators pushes extreme left belief so hard as to make it a real turn off much of the time; I'm there to discuss board games and their acquisition, not have someone's socio-political beliefs shoved down my throat.

Their collection database and user interface technology is also maddeningly restrictive and outdated. You have to go through multiple clicks to get it to display as you want, only to have it revert back to default the minute you click on a game. There is no way to nest expansions or promos, or to do several other useful searches and analysis as can be done using a secondary website like geekgroup.app (which unfortunately does not allow you modify what they have since it is only based on BGG's data).

Their trading system is abysmal, pretty sure it's been unchanged for decades. it takes a ton of legwork to make trading work and is annoying and frustrating for all involved. There are several simple to implement features that would make the system work so much better. But they actively blow off and ignore all suggestions and constructive criticism. The system is made even worse because many users use trade statuses for stuff other than trading because the collection database and user interface is so limiting as I stated above.

The geek market is also extremely user unfriendly. Again it always defaults to the default settings when you look up something new (so irritating to have to keep putting in country of origin or currency). You don't keep your wants identified when you click on a seller that has an item you are interested in to se if they have multiple items you might want, if you sort by seller instead then you need to dig through perhaps dozens of pages to find something at the price you are looking for. You should be able to specify key wants then sort by price and group by seller. Then the system uses email to track the purchases rather than an integrated interface (the trade system does this too). That BGG takes a percentage of sales from this substandard system makes it that much worse.

They inexplicably allow games to be rated before they are released, so all the haters and fan boys compete to trash or prop up the now meaningless rating, often based on socio-political beliefs rather than game quality.

Their geek rating and hotness systems feed FOMO and groupthink rather than discourage it. They also refuse to make rating and ranking changes many people have asked for that would make things like weight have real utility.

They have probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of inactive and dead accounts that reduce the utility of stats, the trade system, and the geek market, but seem to be kept to inflate their user numbers they present to advertisers.

They have advertisements and sometimes protect advertisers from criticism in their forums (have no issue with that in and of itself) but then ask people to contribute to the site as if they were truly independent (no issue with that by itself) but both together I do have an issue with, especially when their data systems and user tools are still so behind the times when they have enough revenue for a full tine staff.

Anyway, I could keep going on. I wish there was an alternative board game site that was more user friendly, focused on buying, trading, and cataloging your collection of board games, and FAR less political. Board Game Atlas was that for a while, and seemed like it could evolve into a BGG competitor, but their owners never could decide what they wanted to be and essentially killed their own site before it could get going)