Board Game Book Review

Turn to a random page in The Board Game Book and you will find a game from 2018, described, reviewed and illustrated with some stellar photography. This is a celebration of last years best releases, an entire blogs worth of content printed and bound in glorious A4, hardcover, technicolor, surround sound, you name it. The question is then, why?

Players: 1
Time: 5-10 mins, ~16 hours for the entire campaign
Designers: Owen Duffy, Matt Thrower, Teri Litorco, Richard Jansen-Parkes

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No one needs to pay £23 for a catalogue or glorified shopping guide no matter how weighty or nicely bound. I originally backed the kickstarter for this on what amounts to a whim. I knew a couple of the people involved from my time in the UK board game industry and I wanted to support an interesting and unusual Kickstarter project. But I didn’t back because of my desire to own the final product, necessarily. 

I didn’t really expect there to be anything new this book could tell me. I mean surely I of all people am at the paper-cut edge of the board game industry? Yet what you have in the Board Game Book is not just a catalogue. The included games have been curated by the team so that, broadly speaking, only the best have made it in. So this is a showcase of 2018’s releases. While of course all the games you expect to be there, your Roots and Brass Birminghams, your Azuls and your Minds, are there, so many of these games had passed me by. I was delighted to hear about Mars Open: Tabletop Golf, Skylands, Sakura. I refuse to believe there couldn’t be a surprise or two in there for you too!

So, pick a game. On the first page you’ll find the impressively concise review – an object lesson that I should really try and learn from! They manage to condense the most interesting features into swiftly digested chunks, place the games in their context within the hobby, and highlight both what works, and what doesn’t in a matter of only a few paragraphs. The writers’ experience (Owen Duffy wrote about board games for the Guardian, Matt Thrower for Shut Up & Sit Down, as well as the Tabletop Gaming book) easily shines through. 

I am pleased that they do go to lengths to discuss the flaws of the games they study. It would have been easy for a book of this type to focus only on the positives. The curation process has stripped out anything that might have earned a truly negative review (obsessive hobbyists might like to play ‘spot-the-gaps’) but no game gets through without some nuance. 

God it feels weird to review reviews. Let’s talk about the next page.

The other half of each spread is perhaps the book’s biggest selling point: interviews with the designers. While not every game got this treatment, the vast majority did and they are wonderful to read. The value of the authors’ journalistic credentials again demonstrate themselves here as they get right into the insights with a minimum of fluff. Again, the constrained space works in their favour.

There is also a short RPG section, a space for miniatures games, and a quick overview of popular board game apps and ‘gateway’ games to round out the book. As the title suggests, though, board games are absolutely the focus. 

I haven’t sat down and read The Board Game book cover to cover. It isn’t that kind of book. Instead it’s something to dip into for 5 to 10 minutes at a time. Read about a game. Then pop back on the coffee table till you next have a break. It is a little too big and unwieldy to work as bathroom reading, sadly, though I wouldn’t claim to be a world expert on such things. 

So what do you get for your £23. A permanent reminder and resource for the best games of 2018. A wonderful mix of interviews and commentary, in a form that is perfect for flipping through in a moment of peace – I don’t know many ways of engaging with board games in such moments beyond mindless scrolling through the devils that are social media feeds. And a showcase of board game photography which is never not pleasant to lose oneself in. The Board Game Book is never something anybody will need, but it is certainly a lovely thing to have.

 Rating: Bookmarked

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The next edition of The Board Game Book is up on Kickstarter until October 2nd!