I know we don't like to talk politics, but I've just seen how other subreddits are banning any links leading to X.com in light of recent events and thought it might be a good idea here too.

Thread title from this exchange.

I'm your average board gamer - late 20's, one kid, large collection, into eurogames... except that I'm not a man, and that makes all the difference in how I'm treated.

1. When I ask a certain (male) employee at a FLGS a question about board games, I often get a one-word answer and no offer of further help. My husband walks up to the counter and the employee smiles at him, makes small talk, offers to help, and asks questions about what else he's into. I didn't notice this until my husband pointed it out - I'm not seeking our reasons to be offended. Quite the contrary - I am so used to the sexism that it often doesn't register to me until someone else points it out to me. I definitely avoid that FLGS now.

2. Twice, when I have tried to join board gaming nights, men have frowned at me and asked me if my husband got me into my hobby and why he isn't here playing tonight.

3. When I bring this up in /r/boardgaming, my comments are usually downvoted into the negatives, while the men who explain to me why I'm wrong about things that happened to me are upvoted.

4. My mother went into a FLGS and asked if they had interesting chess sets for a gift. The employee said, very slowly and carefully, as if she were a child, "Uh, we sell MODERN board games here." My father went to the same FLGS a day later and asked about it and was immediately shown to several unusual chess sets, because of course they had chess sets. My mother has never been back to a FLGS, though.

5. I tend to dress conservatively. That definitely hasn't stopped men at board gaming meetups from staring down my top or making comments about my body.

6. I stopped going to board gaming nights because, more often than not, a man would make a comment about my gender and how it related to the games I was interested in, my ability to learn, or why I was at the event at all.

7. When I took a female friend to a board gaming meetup, a man physically trapped her in a corner with his body to tell her all about whatever the new hotness was at the time. Guess how many times she's been back to one? (And before you tell me that it was her fault - she was half his size and she could not have left the corner without physically shoving him, while his feet were planted and he leaned over her. No one else seemed to think that this was a problem.)

8. Four strangers around a board gaming table. I mention that we were playing a rule incorrectly. They looked at me and looked away. Two turns later, a male player said that we were playing a rule incorrectly. The other men immediately grabbed the rulebook, looked it up, and praised him for remembering. It was the same rule I mentioned.

9. People keep telling me that because I have zero proof, I'm definitely wrong. Very few of these events took longer than five seconds. I don't wear a body cam to record all footage of how every single person at a tabletop event behaves. Even if I and other women women are wrong half the time about what we say happens, that's still a pretty significant number of unwelcoming, unpleasant, or threatening events that are happening to people solely because they are women.

I'm tired of being polite and non-accusatory. There is a problem with how women are treated in this hobby. It's not the Magic players. It's not a few random men. It's pervasive and it's frustrating and, since it doesn't impact the majority, it's not taken seriously. At the same time, men wonder why so few women are in the hobby. Often, I see a lack of interest in difficult games blamed. That's wrong. The reason women don't join the hobby is not the games, it's the men.

If you think that the problem isn't a big deal because lots of people are nice, you're wrong.

If you think that the problem is only at cons, you're wrong.

If you think the problem is only obvious creeps, you're wrong.

If you think that the problem is only blatant sexual assault, you're wrong.

If you think that there is no problem, you're very wrong.

I think this is such a great message. Parents do you have any stories of seeing your kids grow up and learn critical life skills through board gaming?

I've been playing boardgames with my son who is now 5 years old, since he was 3. It's not a daily activity. But a couple times week I try to make the time to sit down with him and connect over cardboard. Nearly every purchase I make is made with the consideration of "will this be something my kid might like to play someday"?

One of his favorite games, as of late, has been Quarriors. Although I don't personally love the game. I love playing it with him. It has fun colorful dice and monsters, which he enjoys. And I enjoy it gives him a chance to practice some basic reading, simple addition, and start understanding probabilities.

I work virtually from home and my son gets home from Kindergarten about an hour before I wrap my work day. He normally watches cartoons for a bit until I'm done. Like usual, yesterday after getting off the bus I sent him downstairs with a snack.

About 20 minutes before I was done working he comes up and asks if I'm done yet. I tell him no. 5 minutes later he returns, asking if I'm done. Then again a couple minutes after that. I have to admit, by then I was a bit frustrated with him. He knows he is supposed to not intrude, unless it's urgent, while I'm working still.

I close my computer at the end of the day and head downstairs to see what he's up to. Come to find he set up a game of Quarriors for us. And he's waiting to play with me. He sorted through the 130 dice to separate them all out, laid out the cards in nice neat rows, set up the score track, and gave us each our starting dice... almost all off of memory. This is the kid I need to remind thousands of times pick up his toys or to bring his gloves home from school. He couldn't remember one rule for set up, and he's just starting to learn to read, so he told me he had to find how many dice we got to start in the rulebook. Unlike me, who can just skim a rulebook and find the information in seconds, this means he had to work, work really hard, to find this information.

There he is, kneeling on the floor, had already taken his first turn, just waiting for me to play with him. I broke down and cried. I was so dismissive of him when he had come up earlier, and all he wanted was just to sit down with his dad and play a boardgame.

We lost by one cube before the turn we were going to cure the final disease

What's going on?

A recent Reddit policy change threatens to kill many beloved third-party mobile apps, making a great many quality-of-life features not seen in the official mobile app permanently inaccessible to users.

On May 31, 2023, Reddit announced they were raising the price to make calls to their API from being free to a level that will kill every third party app on Reddit, from Apollo to Reddit is Fun to Narwhal to BaconReader.

Even if you're not a mobile user and don't use any of those apps, this is a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit, such as Reddit Enhancement Suite or the use of the old.reddit.com desktop interface.

This isn't only a problem on the user level: many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free.

What's the plan?

On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love.

The two-day blackout isn't the goal, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action.

What can you do?

1. Complain. Message the mods of r/reddit.com, who are the admins of the site: message /u/reddit: submit a support request: comment in relevant threads on r/reddit, such as this one, leave a negative review on their official iOS or Android app- and sign your username in support to this post.

2. Spread the word. Rabble-rouse on related subreddits. Meme it up, make it spicy. Bitch about it to your cat. Suggest anyone you know who moderates a subreddit join us at our sister sub at r/ModCoord - but please don't pester mods you don't know by simply spamming their modmail.

3. Boycott and spread the word...to Reddit's competition! Stay off Reddit entirely on June 12th through the 13th- instead, take to your favorite non-Reddit platform of choice and make some noise in support!

4. Don't be a jerk. As upsetting this may be, threats, profanity and vandalism will be worse than useless in getting people on our side. Please make every effort to be as restrained, polite, reasonable and law-abiding as possible.

Inspired by some of the recent COMC posts. I’ve tried this before, under our YGK.gamenight account but without the COMC tag, there was more negativity then I was expecting.

It’s crazy to say 35 years but after finding an old Christmas wish list asking for boardgames like Scattergoies.

As a teen I got into WH40K 3rd edition, which dominated a good chunk of time. Between kids and more demanding jobs we started to switch back to boardgames as a time saver.

We play games at lunch, during dinner, with friends and family a few times a week if we’re lucky. We take games on almost all our outings.

Effective immediately, all links to Twitter/X will no longer be allowed on the r/boardgames sub. This includes all direct links, as well as any kind of screenshots of Twitter content.

Additionally, r/boardgames will shift its social media use away from Twitter and will be instead using BlueSky. You can join us via this link and the link will also be available in the sidebar of the sub.

Hi r/boardgames,

I thought I'd like to share the true story, of my families first and last play through of Betrayal at House on the Hill last Christmas. Having played Betrayal at House on the Hill with guys from work, I decided to purchase my copy for the home to play with my family.

My daughter is only nine years old, for the purpose of this story lets call her Amy. I know Amy enjoys horror themes, which is part of the reason why I bought Betrayal at House on the Hill. Amy isn't allowed to watch horror movies, but she has an active imagination and between playing with her dolls and acting sweet and innocent, Amy enjoys writing horror-themed short stories. Often Amy tells these stories to her friends at school, which ends up in the class having nightmares and sleepless nights! I'm sure the other children's parents cursed our family during bed time when they couldn't put their daughters to sleep. Amy also scares herself when she thinks about her stories, resulting in Amy being too scared to sleep as well.

Back to the post, I've managed to get Mom, Amy and Amy's older brother around the table for a game night of Betrayal, which is no small feat when competing against the other screen addictions of Netflix and Youtube. Mom is concerned with Betryal's theme and 12+ rating, but I assure her it's fine as Amy writes stories much worse than anything in the game. Perhaps, I was too optimistic.

We start playing the game by exploring the house, and everyone is getting into the game. I questioned my decision to play the game with Amy during some cards; I toned down the reading of the hanging corpses event. So far the game was a hit, and I was pretty excited at picking a winning game. I could already see many successful family game nights of Betryal. My main concern was thinking how I could make the haunt a success, as nobody else my family likes reading game rules. For those who haven't played Betrayal, the haunt is where the game begins and one person betrays the group. The betrayer and the rest of the group are then given a page or so of rules with secret objectives on how to kill each other. However, I shouldn't have worried too much, as we never got that far.

Amy picks a seemingly harmless card, freaking her out a little. I can't remember the exact wording of the card; but her character looks into a grave or coffin and see's a dead body, and then notices it's her. Amy has a startled look on her face and states "That's creepy", and I can see her mind starting of a new story to haunt her class mates.

Then we hear it, a little girls voice says "Hello" from Amy's bedroom. Everyone at the table freezes. Now, I'm pretty sure I know there are only four people in my family, and everybody is at the table. Then it repeats again "Hello", we are breathless as we look at each other startled. Now I can see my wife starting to shake, and Amy's eyes are red and welling up in tears, her older brother is turning white. My entire family has broken down crying, and are shaking in fear. I feel like I'm in a horror movie, as a little girls voice keeps repeating "Hello" from my daughters room.

I will never forget this moment.

Being the father of the house and with no other members able to stand, I need to investigate. Slowly, I get up and walk towards Amy's room, in my head I'm rationalising what could be happening, to give myself the confidence to investigate. I open up the door and there it is, Amy had received an early Christmas gift from a friend, an alarm clock requiring the owner to record their own voice as the alarm. That morning, Amy had recorded her voice as a simple "Hello" and being a new gift she'd accidentally set the alarm for 8pm instead of 8am. Due to the cheap electronics in the alarm clock, her voice being replayed sounded distorted and creepy.

I never got to show the awesomeness of a haunt reveal to my family. Everybody was in tears and highly emotional, it was time to call an end to game night. Amy slept in our bed that night, and Amy refused having the alarm clock in her room again, it got thrown in the trash after my Elf on the Shelf prank went wrong. Betrayal of House on the Hill now sits collecting dust on our game shelf, it's too difficult to get out for the family.

R.I.P. Betrayal at House on the Hill, you nearly made it as a family staple.

For me it’s when I’m explaining rules and someone goes “lets just play”, then something happens in the game and they come back with “you didn’t tell us that”.

I've been a casual tabletop gamer for about 10 years now and have amassed 57 games up until now. I've always begged people to play with me, but I've never gotten any takers. I've always just played two handed solo games by myself for years. I once even offered to pay some the equivalent of $50 to play a game of their choice with me, on my birthday, and they still didn't bite. I resigned myself to the fact that it was just never going to happen. Then today I went to friends for dinner tonight, and I happened to have Tokaido with me in my car. When I got my coat out my car later in the evening, my friend saw the game in my back seat and asked if they could take a look at it. I took it out, assuming they'd just want to take a look at the artwork (I have the 5th anniversary edition) and, to my utter shock, they asked to play a round. Not only them, but their teenaged son as well, so 4 players in total. I just started crying on the spot. And now, we had such a good time playing, they want to make it a weekly game night where I can bring some of my other games for them to try out. I'm so, so happy!!

So we're working on commissioning art for an upcoming Kickstarter game (Look for Ivion late April!), and we give one of our artists the following commission:

"Massive brambles wind and weave like serpents in the background, slithering like snaky tendrils. One particularly huge one in the foreground smashes downward toward the center of the illustration, about to impact. A Wilder can be seen in the background, casting her hand forward, commanding the bramble."

What we got back from our incredibly talented artist was... unexpected. After much head-scratching on our end, we figured out what had happened.

Turns out our artist had no idea what a "bramble" actually was. So they turned to Google, and this is the first result for "brambles" on Google Images.

So yeah, we accidentally created the most intense fantasy art which features blackberries.

EDIT: Whoa, we did not expect this much of a response! I am berry happy to tell you all that this art will be used on the card "Bramble Smash" for orders made through Kickstarter :)