Few days ago I asked on my Twitter feed 'What is your favorite board games reviewer’. As you can suppose, answers pop up quickly. And pop up in big numbers. 🙂 I collected them, counted and here I have them for you. Geeks recommendation for best reviewers in board gaming hobby! Here is vox populi!

1. Rahdo Runs Through

Amazing man. He is a living container for positive energy. When I watch his movies, every single second I am afraid he will just explode in front of camera. Pure energy. Rahdo has this amazing idea for his reviews – cut in 3 separate videos. First one is general overview of game play and example of first turn of the game. Second movie shows extended game play- if you are interested. Third one is opinion about the game – final thoughts.

2. DriveThru Reviews

I met Joel and played with him at Gen con. Super cool guy. His reviews are – I would say – quite opposite to Rahdo’s, I mean, Joel looks like he just woke up a minute before he started to record. 😉 His movies are shorter, he is not talkin’ much about rules and game play, he focuses on core of review – opinion about the game.

3. The Dice Tower

His Majesty Tom Vasel, world’s most famous reviewer, owning The Dice Tower channel with reviews, news, audio podcasts (yes, plural!)… He publishes a lot of reviews. As he says, he want to review every game out there. It is certainly mission impossible, but he does his best to provide us with as much information about games, as possble. His channel has 60k subscribes. Quite a number, huh?

Geeks recommend also:

4. Undead Viking,
5. Ryan Metzler (część kanału The Dice Tower),
6. Shut Up & Sit Down,
7. The Game Boy Geek (część kanału The Dice Tower),
8. Watch It Played,

…and many many more.

I am not that good with bragging. I mean, I try to talk about my successes and achievements, but I am always afraid of this small line between sharing happiness of achieving some success and between bragging. Talk to much about your self and you no longer act like happy person. You act like jerk.

So here I am. Thin line. Not bragging. Just sharing my pride and happiness…

Gameinformer picked Robinson to Top 10 Tabletop Games of 2013. Yuppi! Nominations are here.

Space-Biff put Robinson as #1 choice at Best 2013 Alone / Co-op. All other great games you will find here.

Space-Biff put my other game – Convoy – as #7 choice at Best 2013 Head-to-heads. Great games for2 players you will find here.

In the meantime ZMan published their second print of the game and Robinson jumped to #23 rank at BGG. In my most cocky dreams I would not predict this. Thank you for all your votes! Thank you so much!

I know this game is hard to get. If you have chance to play it – have a try. This is really a fine game. 

This week I finally managed to play Friday by Friedemann Friese. Game was released years ago, but my copy arrived early December, from Polish MathTrade.

I played and it was shock – Friday has exact the same game mechanism like Robinson – this is deckbuilding! Just like in Robinson you draw a card and you decide if you discard it or fight it and as a consequences you shuffle it into a deck. 

How on earth this is possible! Two game designers working separately came up with the same theme (Robinson) and used exact the same mechanism!

And what is more, how it is possible none of reviewers spotted it?! Why all reviewers who review Robinson say nice things about my idea, but none of them mentions published one year earlier Friday? Is Friedemann thinking that I stole his idea? Why no one sees that? I am the only one who see that both of us came up with the same idea?

This is very awkward situation – but I have good advice here. Play Friday. It is very cool solo game. I recommend it… just like my own design!

I spent Christmas playing games. Of course I played with Merry for most of the time, but I played with my kids too. And after this – nearly two weeks – of pure gaming I have this reflection: For Christ’s sake! Stop designing memory games! Don’t you have any other ideas? Don’t you know that kids like adventures. They want fun. They want princess and dragons. They want enchanted forests and magical potions. Cool stuff. Not another fucking memory game.

My this year’s Essen game is in jeopardy. I may sit at my desk and start work on a kids game. I am really sick of poor kids games. Children deserve something more.