Reiner? I hardly knew ‘er

I’m not going to re-invent the wheel here, and write out a huge biography. You can see his designer page on BGG for that level of detail. He’s a game designer who started out with a PhD in mathematics, worked in banking, and then started designing games. The reason he’s so important to the hobby is how influential he was during the first modern board game boom, in the ’90s.

When I called him prolific in the opening paragraph, I wasn’t exaggerating. In the ’90s alone he had at least 115 games published. Let that sink in. That’s nearly a game a month, every month, for ten years straight! Were they all great? No, there’s some instantly forgettable stuff in there, some extra-light roll-and-move games, kids games – all kinds of things.

The good games he made during that time – the really good ones – are very important to modern board games. To illustrate the point, let me tell you that nine of the top 1,000 games on BGG are ones that Knizia had published in the ’90s.

If that doesn’t sound impressive, let me put it another way. Just about 1% of the top 1,000 games on BGG today, are ones that he created before the PlayStation 2 was released.

Slapping on some context

Let’s apply some context to all those facts. Firstly, and most importantly, the board game scene in the ’90s was a wildly different place. Even though Knizia was pumping out games in his sleep, the actual number of new games released every year was much smaller than today. Each year in that decade saw around 1,000 games published per year. In 2021 alone, 5,000 new games were released, and that number looks set to grow in the near future.

Every game released back then had a much smaller market to compete against, so real stand-out games were able to lodge themselves at the top of the BGG charts, once the site launched in 2000. The big unknown in all of what I’m talking about in this article is the BGG ranking algorithm. The numbers and formulae that determine a board game’s rank on BGG is a secret, but it’s generally understood that a big part of it is users individual users’ ratings, averaged when a certain threshold of ratings are submitted for each game.

I believe there must be some level of ranking decay applied too, otherwise older games with very high ratings would almost never get toppled. If that’s true, then it’s not surprising that older games slip. If an older game is out-of-print, and hundreds of new games are riding a wave of social media hype, who is buying and ranking older games any more?

Knizia’s still big, right?

See, that’s what I thought. But then I started to think – which of his games have I bought, or played, lately? Lost Cities has been in my collection forever, and I recently picked up the roll and write version (which is great). The same goes for Heckmeck, it’s evergreen for me. But what about other people? Do they buy and play his games? There was only one way to find out – to Facebook!

I’m a member of a great UK-based board game group on Facebook called Board Game Trading and Chat UK (BGT&C UK), so I asked the folks there. In particular, I wanted to know how long people have been in the hobby, and how many Reiner Knizia games they own. Over 200 people responded, and the results confirmed what I’d already guessed. Here are the headlines.

• Over a third (35%) of respondents who took up the hobby since early 2019 have never bought a Reiner Knizia game.

• Nearly a quarter (22%) of respondents who have been into board games for longer than 3 years, own six or more Reiner Knizia games.

The replies on the poll told the same sort of story. Recent gamers had games like My City or The Quest for El Dorado. None of them are buying the classics such as Tigris and Euphrates, Samurai, or Ra. There’s a very good reason which explains some of that – they’re out-of-print and very hard to get. Even if they weren’t though, would they stand a chance against the Gloomhavens and Ark Novas of the world?

Are the games that good, or is it nostalgia?

I asked myself more questions at this point. Am I just looking at his games with rose-tinted glasses, in the same way some people convince themselves VHS and audio cassettes were best? Have games just moved on in recent years, leaving everyone’s favourite bowtie-wearing German irrelevant? This is a tricky one, because it’s always going to be subjective. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and all that jazz. Personally though, I have to say yes – yes they’re still great games worth your time. I carry Lost Cities in my work bag, just in case an opportunity presents itself, and at GridCon last year I played Heckmeck. His games are still in my regular rotation.

Ra, Medici, Battle Line, Keltis, Modern Art, Amun-Re – they’re all great games, and would fit in at most modern games nights. They just don’t get the exposure they deserve any more, and that lack of popularity perpetuates a vicious circle, which sees the games not getting reprinted. Just last year, both Z-Man and Grail Games dropped their plans to print new and old Knizia games, because they just weren’t selling as well as they’d hoped.

Sad times for old farts like me. Sad times also for anyone new to the hobby, hoping to catch up on some classics.

Hype has so much to do with which games people play now. We get bombarded on all fronts of social media with new games. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are full of people getting onboard with the latest hotness, and it’s changed the way people choose and buy games. Reiner’s games don’t normally go near Kickstarter, which means making a dent in a potential buyer’s consciousness is harder than ever.

Playing Knizia games in 2022 and beyond

So what does this year, and indeed the future, have in store for Knizia fans like me? Well, it’s a mixture of good and bad news really. The bad is the issues I mentioned above, with the difficulty of getting his out-of-print gems. People who got into board games during the pandemic are going to struggle to get hold of a copy of Tigris & Euphrates without paying through the nose for a second-hand copy, and the same goes for most of his other big box games.

He will, inevitably, keep producing new games, the majority of which will come through traditional channels. My Island for example, the follow-up to 2020’s My City, is due later this year, and is sure to do well. The small box classics like Lost Cities, High Society and Schotten Totten are seemingly always available, and thoroughly recommended as ways to sample some of his design, if he’s new to you.

The most exciting news, as far as I’m concerned, is that Alley Cat Games have picked up the reprint of Amun-Re. Alley Cat make really nice productions, and have already proven they can handle reprints of older titles, with last years revamp of Tinners’ Trail. Now that the rights for the older games have been handed back to the original owners, I hope we see other publishers picking them up, and refreshing them for a new audience.

To wrap-up then – yes, Reiner Knizia doesn’t have the same prominence as he did 20 years ago, nor does his name have the same clout when it’s printed on a box. Writing him off would be a mistake though, and there is still a vast trove of his games to play, to get acquainted with his work. In fact, you can do it for free, right now. Follow this link to his free print-and-play of a great dice game – Decathlon.

I’m glad our hobby has Dr Knizia in it, it’s a brighter, better place for it. Long may it continue.

Author’s notes

Hey folks, I just wanted to take a few lines to cover a few things. Firstly, yes, this entire article was spawned by – and makes constant reference to – the BGG rankings. I know that not everyone agrees with their rankings, or finds them important, but they’re undeniably a strong marker for popular opinion.

Secondly, this post isn’t meant to knock the good doctor in any way, or suggest he’s not designing good games. The man’s a genius as far as I’m concerned, and there are games of his that will stay in my collection forever.

Finally, I’m particularly pleased with the heading “Reiner? I hardly knew ‘er”. The bonus wordplay in there is ‘er’ being the German pronoun for ‘him’. I amuse myself, if no-one else.

The post Reiner Knizia – Staying Relevant appeared first on Punchboard.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not woefully bad, but the vast majority of the time, I don’t win games. I don’t think I can even tell you why. I know what things work together in games, and I can advise people about known good tactics, but when it comes to me, I’m rubbish. Maybe you’re reading this thinking “Yeah, yeah, false modesty, fishing for compliments there, Adam”, but it’s true.

I’m not very good at most board games.

This is the point where I was going to post my win/loss statistics for various games, but to be honest with you, I bored myself just writing it. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

“The true object of all human life is play”

GK Chesterton had it right with that quote. It’s so important to keep play in your life, regardless of your age. A lot of people get that playing fix through video games now, and I’ve been in that demographic for more than three decades. The trouble I find with most video games now, is that I lack the necessary attention span for anything big. I also tend to choose competitive games, and I find that having a bad hour of play leaves me feeling more stressed than before I started. That’s the opposite of what I want from a game.

When I play board games, I just enjoy the act of moving stuff around. I like watching my poorly-made choices unfurl further into the game, like coiled tentacles from the octopus of mediocrity. I like talking to the other players, regardless of whether they’re sat next to me, or on the other side of the planet via something like BGA.

Playing board games is, for me, a joyful experience. I finished an online game of Tapestry earlier the other day with a group of friends, and I ended up losing by over 400 points! If you haven’t played Tapestry, that’s quite a lot of points. It didn’t matter though, I had fun, I experimented, and was able to laugh at my own ineptitude afterwards.

Two sides of the same coin

People play games for lots of different reasons, but ultimately it all comes down to fun. Even if you’ve taken your hobby to a level that now feels like work, it started because you were having fun with it. If you play board games, which I assume you do if you’re reading this, how often do you ask yourself where the fun comes from?

The joy of a game comes from two different sources for me. The first is something I’ve spoken about at length before, and even had an article published about. It’s playing solo board games. The passive relaxation that my brain gets from not thinking about the usual worries and stresses of life, is something I cannot put a price on. The combination of that mental relief, and sitting down with my favourite games, is a wonderful thing.

The other source of happiness in board games comes not from the games, but the people you play them with. There are so few good reasons to spend time interacting with the people you like, that many people don’t even do it. That’s incredibly sad – the need to have a reason to enjoy one another’s company. But that’s the world we live in, and board games are the glue that binds my favourite social experiences together. We’re all playing the same game, but what generates the fun is the people around the table. It’s the conversations, the laughs, the banter, and the drama as games unfold. What makes me want to go back the next games night, isn’t the game I played, but the people I played it with.

Grow up

Hands up if you’ve ever heard that, or words to that effect. There’s a troubling stigma that’s attached to ‘play’ for some people – the notion that for some reason, if you play games, you’re still just a child. You don’t deserve to be treated like an adult. No, you need to be out doing 12 hours of hard labour every day to earn the respect of these people. I’m here to tell you that play is okay. It’s more than okay, it’s important. You’re allowed to play. You’re allowed to have fun, and if anyone thinks otherwise, they’re wrong.

I’m well into my fifth decade on the planet now, and I play as often as I can. I’m going to keep doing it too, because life can be hard, it’s too short, and nobody wants to shuffle of this mortal coil thinking “Well, I’m glad I didn’t enjoy myself, like some kid, while I was here”.

It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it really doesn’t. It doesn’t matter if your stats for Lost Ruins Of Arnak this year are 11 games, 0 wins (oddly specific, I know). Enjoy the moment. Enjoy the company of the people you’re with, and if that happens to be just you, then enjoy losing yourself in a pointless, made-up world. Learn from experience, get better, sure, but don’t sweat it. Lose triumphantly, then exclaim with me:

“I suck at this game, but it makes me smile!”

Which games do you love despite being horrible at them? Leave a comment, or let me know on Twitter.

The post I’m bad at board games (but I don’t mind) appeared first on Punchboard.

Under the influence

We live in a world now, where Influencer is a career. People build up huge numbers of followers on the various social media platforms, and have become honest-to-goodness celebrities. Every hobby and interest you can imagine has its own army of influencers and celebrities, and legions of devotees trailing behind them, hanging on their every word, waiting for them for to tell us what’s hot, what we should be wearing, eating, drinking – and playing. Board game Twitter and Instagram have huge numbers of followers, Tiktok is gathering steam, and even the stalwart of video game streaming – Twitch – is seeing huge growth in board gamers.

It’s always been the case that publishers gift copies of games to prominent names in return for reviews, previews, how-to-plays, and just general exposure. Over the last couple of years however, some publishers have taken it a step further, and are now hiring these same people to act as a presence for them. Organising their social media posts, drumming up support for Kickstarters, and liaising with their public and media contacts too.

It sounds like a match made in heaven. A fan-base with an already familiar face telling the world how good the games are. What could possibly go wrong?

Clique-bait

There’s a real danger inherent in this approach, and it lies with the influencers themselves. If you spend any amount of time following any of the prominent names on board game Twitter, you’re likely to see tempers flare, and lines drawn in the sand. There’s established bad blood between some people, and as is the case with human nature, people like to take sides. This leads to block-lists being created, and people actively ensuring they can never interact with people, just because of their implied association with others.

This isn’t just anecdotal either, I know this from experience. There are at least two very high profile names in the board game Twitterverse who have blocked me. I have never interacted with either of them. I can only assume that I’ve followed or replied to someone that’s on their hitlist, and I’ve been pre-emptively blocked. While it’s like water off a duck’s back to me, it’s just a small example of the type of division that exists. People disagree with others’ views, they fall out with other people, and some people just aren’t very nice. That’s life. But what does it mean for the people their employers want to reach?

People on Twitter and Instagram are told to curate their followers, often by these self-same influencers. “Make sure you don’t associate with these people, they are bad eggs”. Responsible calls-to-action like this add evidence of some kind, but I’ve seen plenty of occasions where die-hard fans will block anyone and everyone they’re told to, just because they’re told to. When it comes to people interacting with other people, this is fine. It is what it is, you’re never going to change human nature, so you either like it or lump it. When these people become the public faces of businesses though, that’s another matter. Does this famous face accurately represent their company, their ethics, and their ideals?

A case in point

The names here aren’t real, but the situation is. I do some review work with a publisher who has a social media personality organising their relationships with the media and the public. Let’s call this person Steve. I was talking to a good friend (Bob), who also does board game review work and is a much bigger deal than me, who had a eureka moment when we were talking. You see, Bob used to work very closely with this publisher, and had a long-standing, good relationship with them. However, in the distant past, Influencer Steve took a dislike to Bob, and caused them a great deal of trouble and upset. This same publisher more recently has had no contact with Bob, and Bob hasn’t been invited to preview The Big New Game. Coincidence?

Of course, it could just be coincidence. Maybe they want to move on with other people now instead, but even my spidey-senses are tingling in this situation. It certainly doesn’t feel like a coincidence. This is just one example, which I happened to stumble upon during an unrelated conversation. But it got me to wondering – how many other examples of situations like this must be happening all the time now? Do the publishers even realise it’s happening? Do they care?

Perhaps a better question is – How can this be made safer for publishers? I don’t know what’s involved with the hiring of a Bright Young Thing to represent them on social media, but I wonder how much vetting takes place. How far back in the person’s posting history do they go? Have they been involved in controversy in the past? Do they share their ethics and values? Do they ask them to openly declare any current problems or issues they have with any particular creators, influencers, other publishers? Maybe they do, and this was just an isolated incident, but a part of me doubts it.

Tread carefully

I think there’s a real risk for this blowing up in a publisher’s face, and I don’t think it’s far off happening. Of course, the situation could be reversed and it turns out someone at the publisher turns out to be a bad actor, but it’s easier for an Influencer to cut ties without bad financial and reputational damage being done. For them, it’s usually a side-gig, but for a publisher, there’s a real risk of a bigger impact. People will always come with baggage, we just need to make sure that baggage doesn’t prevent them from working in their new employer’s best interests.

I’ll end this by saying I know this isn’t the case across the board. I know some really good people who have roles like these, and they do an excellent job. When it works, it’s fantastic. My worry is for the people making our games, working against a worldwide pandemic, a global shipping crisis, wood shortages, increased costs at every step of the way. My worry is someone with their own agenda could alienate a group of people to such an extent that it sinks a publisher, or damages them irreparably. How much influence is too much influence?

The post Bad Influence – Social Media Personalities as Marketers? appeared first on Punchboard.

I want to tell you why your rulebooks should be the best, most exciting thing when you open the box. I want to explain what goes well when a rulebook is good, and just how bad it can be when a game’s rules are poorly written. Hopefully by the time you finish reading this, you’ll have a newfound appreciation for your games’ rules.

After all…

The rulebook IS the game

When you take the time to think about it, you start to realise just how vital a game’s rules are. Without the rules, all you’re left with is a box full of tokens and pieces. You could try to make a game out of it, but it would be impossible to play the same game the designer created. The rules take the pieces in the box, and tell you what to do with them in order to have some fun.

This is another point in the proceedings where it’s worth taking a moment to actively think about that. While some of the things you do in the game might be intuitive, it’s down to the designers and their rules editors to make sure you know what to do with the box of bits once it lands on your doorstep. They’ve got a few pages, a few pictures, and a few thousand words to explain every single thing that happens in the game.

Back to basics

In a simple game, explaining the rules should be relatively easy. If I asked you to write the rules for Snakes & Ladders (Chutes & Ladders), you might think it’s simple, and it might look something like this:

1. Place both pawns on space 1 of the board.
2. Players take turns rolling the dice. Move your pawn along as many spaces as the number you rolled on the dice.
3. If you land on the bottom of a ladder, move your pawn to the space at the top of the ladder.
4. If you land on a snake’s head, move your pawn to the space at the end of the snake’s tail.
5. The first player to space 100 wins!

Great, you know how to play Snakes & Ladders now. As the designer I can put those rules in the box and breathe a sigh of relief, confident you know how to enjoy my vision. But now put yourself in the place of the customer. You read the rules and try to play, but you’ve got questions:

• What’s a pawn? There’s no picture included, I don’t know what it is.
• Who goes first? How do we decide?
• How many games are we meant to play? Just one, or did you intend we play a best-of-three?
• What happens if I’m on space 98 and I roll a three? Do I need to roll the exact number? What happens if I go over?

These might seem like exaggerated examples, but they’re all valid questions. If you’re designing a game for families and you don’t explain everything in terms that non-gamers can understand, you’re asking for trouble. We’re only looking at Snakes & Ladders here, a game with no player agency. The entire game is based on random dice rolls, and no decisions can ever change the outcome. Even with such a simple premise we’ve got questions, and where we’ve got questions, we’ve got problems.

Putting on weight

If it’s that tricky to write the rules for a game as simple as Snakes & Ladders, imagine starting from scratch with something as complicated as a war or Euro game. Think about a game like Root, or Scythe. Both games are excellent, and a lot of fun, but that’s only true because the rules are cohesive, consistent, and they both have great rulebooks.

Root includes an extra book which sets the game up in the middle of a preset four-player game. Each player passes the book around, performs the moves written in the book, and reads descriptive text out to the rest of the group. This way everyone gets a gentle introduction into what is essentially a war game, a genre (in)famous for tricky rules. I believe that the Root walkthrough book was instrumental in helping make the game the success that it is. The cute artwork and forest setting is a comfort blanket, draped on top of a game which could have been impenetrable for many. The way the game takes you by the hand and welcomes you into its arboreal embrace is fantastic.

As games become more complicated and try to pack in more content, it’s becoming critical that rulebooks manage to hold the players’ hands through the learning process. With the numbers of board games released each year growing by thousands, there’s a lot of cardboard trying to grab your attention, and the quality of the rulebook can mean the difference between a smash hit and a damp squib.

Who are you? The rules police?

There are some people reading this now thinking “that’s nonsense, a good game is always easy to learn, who do you think you are, beardy?”. It’s a fair point. I’m just a bloke with a funny accent and a love of games, and so in the interest of putting some kind of credibility into this article, I sought some professional insight.

Paul Grogan, of Gaming Rules!, is -among other things – a professional rule book editor. When you consider he works on rule books for games by Vital Lacerda – the modern day king of very heavy board games – it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about making a game understandable. I caught up with him and asked some of the burning questions I had.

A chat with Paul Grogan

Me: Hi Paul, thanks for giving me a few minutes of your time. First things first, what does it take to elevate a rulebook from average, to excellent?

Paul: Good structure first. It should have the right rules, in the right place. A good introduction, taking a high level overview of the game and drilling down into detail when it’s needed. There needs to be a detailed components list with images.

Me: So when it comes to actually writing the rules, what would you say is the most difficult thing?

Paul: Most difficult thing: Gosh… its bloody hard. Harder than most people think. Making a good rulebook requires a good team and good people. It takes a lot of time, effort, checking and rechecking. It’s difficult to say what the “hardest” part is.

Me: It sounds like there are a few different places it can go wrong. Can you think of any examples that spring to mind where a poor rulebook has had a detrimental effect on a game’s success? What do you think went wrong with the rulebooks?

Paul: There are a number of examples of how a poor rulebook killed a game. First Martians, Batman Gotham City Chronicles, and many more. Why were they bad? A combination of things. Structure is the biggest one, hard to find rules that an index cannot fix, over-complicated explanation of some rules.

Me: When a publisher or designer comes to you with a draft rulebook, when you start work on it, what are some of the red flags you’re looking to correct?

Paul: A lack of examples, lack of images, and a lack of blind playtesting, where situations occur which are not in the rulebook. Rules hidden only in examples is another one.

Me: That’s all really interesting, thanks for your time, Paul.

Adding context

Not expecting you, dear reader, to just take my word for it, I did a quick bit of digging into the games mentioned above. Batman: Gotham City Chronicles is, by all accounts, a great game. The biggest problem seems to be around rules confusion though. A couple of minutes on the game’s forums on BGG turned up threads like this one for errata and FAQ, which is currently at seven pages of questions, and has lots of errata relating to the rulebook. There’s another thread where players are pleading with the publishers to listen to them about the rules and player aids.

First Martians seems to have suffered with similar problems. Another dive into the murky depths of the BGG forums for the game reveals, among others, this thread of rules questions and errata, which is currently at 233 posts. First Martians is a game I really want to play, it’s super-heavy, and looks great. But the thought that I’m probably going to have questions, and that there’s probably an answer in the ten pages of that thread, is a big turn-off for me.

This is very much a problem of the internet age. The problem isn’t necessarily with poor rulebooks – that’s always been a problem – but with the fact that in a truly connected world, word travels fast. I can remember hearing about the First Martian problems on Facebook groups, back when I first got sucked into the hobby again. Everyone is capable of a quick search for a game, and very quickly knowing about any shortcomings – in terms of the rules, or anything else about the game.

Looking forwards

Technology’s irresistible growth is pushing into the board game space, and it’s only going to grow. I’m expecting to see interactive rules apps and tutorials becoming commonplace. I don’t think they’ll ever replace rule books, this is meant to be an ‘offline’ hobby after all, but the popularity of how-to-play videos, like the ones from Gaming Rules! and Watch it Played, prove that the hobby isn’t totally adverse to non-physical media. The best that publishers can hope to do is to strive for perfection, knowing that they’ll never reach it. Even in a world as connected as ours, with all manner of collaboration and meeting tools, mistakes can still slip through the net.

Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi created a pair of games released early on in 2021 – Imperium: Classics and Imperium: Legends. These games (which I will get around to reviewing!) are brilliant. Deck-building civilisation games with a huge number of asymmetric races and factions to play as. As a solo game, it’s about as good as it gets, but there’s a major omission in the rules. There’s a type of card which commonly turns up, and the solo bot is meant to just discard it. Unfortunately, that rule was missed in the rulebook, and it means players would treat it as an ‘other’ card and carry out an additional action for the bot, making the game much harder than intended.

Along with other errata and spelling/grammar mistakes, it’s a game that’s crying out for a 2nd printing and an errata pack to fix the original games. Luckily, for the designers and the publishers, through the magic of the internet they’ve been able to print an errata and answer questions. It’s only the sheer quality of the game which has kept people playing, and kept word of mouth spreading its gospel, but it goes to show that even with seasoned designers, and big publishers like Osprey, mistakes will always happen. If you play the Imperium games, you can download the errata here.

Final thoughts

I hope that’s given you a little insight into some of the pitfalls and problems that every rulebook faces, and an idea of the challenges the writers and editors are up against. So the next time you pull your favourite game off the shelf, and remember how easy you found it to learn, spare a thought for the hard work of the people who put it all together, and appreciate the huge job it did in teaching you how to play. They do a difficult job, and we owe much of our enjoyment of this wonderful hobby to the words and pictures inside.

Do you have any favourite examples of rules done well, or those done badly? Let me know in the comments below, or send me a tweet here – twitter.com/punchboarduk. If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy others I’ve written in the blog section.

The post Playing By The Rules appeared first on Punchboard.

In this post I’m taking a look at some of the under-appreciated heroes of game nights: the bits and pieces that keep people like me tidy, and help make the most of our precious leisure time. Things which sometimes mean the difference between a game coming off the shelf, or staying there like a wallflower at a dance, watching on while others have all the fun.

In praise of the humble box insert

People love a good box insert. They make the game’s contents look nice, they are incredibly satisfying to put things away at the end of the game, but most importantly they make the game setup much quicker. Does that really matter? Heck yes, it does! Those of you who enjoy a game with a lot of pieces, think about that game for a moment. Think about clearing the table, opening the box, and then looking down at a pile of baggies big enough to get you pulled aside at an airport.

I like heavy Euro games, and the sheer number of different types of tokens and pieces in some of them is genuinely daunting. Anachrony is an outstanding game, but I don’t play it as often as I want to, because opening and organising everything takes me ages. I don’t have much free time, and I’ll end up spending a significant portion of it just setting the game up to play. How ridiculous is that?

At the opposite end of the scale, I don’t mind choosing Euphoria (review here), even with its expansion included, even though it’s got tons of dice and components. The included insert from GameTrayz makes things so easy to find and setup, and then to pack away afterwards. A place for everything, and everything in its place, as the saying goes. What happens when your game isn’t like PARKS, or Jamaica though, and doesn’t come with a custom-made insert?

Do-it-yourself

The first thing you can try is to make an insert for yourself. I’ve done this with different methods, and varying levels of success. Some people love working with foamcore to create inserts, and I had a go at it myself. I bought the knives, board, steel rulers, dress-making pins and enough PVA glue to stick an elephant to the ceiling. I designed and made an insert for Maracaibo, and while it works, there was so much faffing around, and I ended up covered in more glue than my eight-year-old would have. The better option, if you have access to it, is 3D printing.

3D printing is very precise, but it’s pretty slow going. I printed inserts for Nusfjord and Anno 1800, and they took me days each. Literally days of my poor printer whirring its way through the filament. The end results are great though, and Nusfjord now has player boxes which you can lift out and drop on the table, with everything a player needs. Is it worth doing? It depends on your levels of patience and frustration I suppose. The Anno 1800 insert was almost a necessity for me, as sorting and setting up 44 individual piles of tiles, on top of the cards and resources, takes an age. As a result, I’ll certainly play it more than I might have done otherwise.

And there’s the rub. Straight away I’m saying that I’ll play a game I really enjoy more, just because setting it up is now easier, and less time-consuming. That’s just mad.

Off-the-shelf

The industry recognises the desire for a good insert, so several companies have stepped-up and produce insert kits that you can buy and assemble at home. The most famous of these are the Folded Space inserts. The material they’re made out of is very similar to foamcore, but thicker, and precision cut. All you need to assemble them is some PVA glue, and in my case, a child to supervise. Another great option is e-Raptor, who make their inserts from a harder material, but use interlocking pieces and require no glue. They’re more expensive, but really well-made.

If you’ve never used a box insert like one of these before, you might be sceptical. Spending money on a game you’ve already paid for, just to organise it? That’s money that could be better spent on new games, surely? If this sounds like you, and if you’ve ever felt reluctance to play one of your games just because you know how much time and effort it’s going to take before you even play, then I urge you to try one.

So, you’ve got your game all sorted out and easier to setup and pack away, but what else can you do to make your experience better, and make the most of your time?

Hold me closer

How many times has a rule book told you to make piles of tokens or resources next to the board? Piles of cardboard tokens and wooden pieces strewn over what table space is left, after your cardboard monstrosity claims as much as it can. How many times have those piles spread out, mixed together, or made a bid for freedom, over the edge of the table?

Many of you may already use something as a bits holder, but I’ve played games with a lot of people who have never tried it. It’s such a simple thing to do, and you don’t have to spend any money to do it. If you do buy something you can do it on a budget. Some of the most popular options I’ve seen are silicone muffin cases, and the little glass pots that those Gü desserts come in. How good is that? Chocolate pudding, a token holder, and doing your part of the environment by re-using the pots. That’s my excuse anyway.

I have some 3D printed trays which stack together for storage, and have spouts which help with taking pieces, and for tipping pieces into their bags. Plenty of Etsy shops sell these, and if you have access to a 3D printer you can get the files for it for free, here.

It’s maybe a small thing, but once again, it’s something which makes the whole experience better. Nothing falls to the floor, you don’t reach for a brick and pick up wood, and perhaps most importantly, packing the game away is easier. Open a baggy, tip the pot into it, seal it up.

“Come on now Adam, isn’t this a bit over the top? Saving a few seconds putting things in a bag?”. I don’t think so.

Greater than the sum of its parts

If you’re lucky enough to have all the free time you want, maybe these issues don’t affect you. For me, however, all of these small things have a combined effect that’s really valuable. On a normal day I might have a couple of hours free in the evening to play something. I know how long each game takes to play, so when I’m thinking of playing something that’s going to take 90-120 minutes, every minute I claw back from setting up and packing away is precious.

I know that Anno 1800 takes me at least 15 minutes to setup if I have everything in baggies. When I sit down at the end of a long day of work and being dad, that’s demoralising. Now that I’ve printed this amazing insert though, I can go from it being on the shelf, to being ready to play in under five minutes. When I play Terraforming Mars I use my bits trays for the abundance of cubes it comes with, and bagging them up afterwards takes literally seconds. If I go along to games night with my group, that setup and tear-down time can mean the difference between getting to play another small game that night, or not.

In some of these cases we’re talking about small margins, I know, but sometimes they matter. Our leisure time is fiercely fought-for, with TV, streaming services, video games, social media and any number of other hobbies all vying for our attention. I love board games, I’m passionate about the benefits and fun they provide people with, and anything that helps someone choose to play one instead of stagnating in front of the TV, is a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong, we need that downtime too sometimes, but as an advocate for the mental and social benefits a board game delivers, I want to help you make the most of your time around a table. Get organised, and see if it helps you too.

The post Sort Your Life Out appeared first on Punchboard.

Do the Evolution

“Evolution?!“, I hear you scoff. “What evolution? We’re still throwing dice, flipping cards, and moving bits of plastic and wood on a board“. While that is certainly true, I’d also argue that the quality of the things we’re doing with those physical parts, is advancing at a rate which is seldom seen in other hobbies. Let me try to quantify that.

If you head to a video game forum, group or subreddit, and ask for recommendations for a particular genre, you’ll notice a couple of things. Firstly, You’ll get some shouts for the big new game, whatever that might be, but you’re also more likely to get recommendations for games that are at least a few years old. Ask for a shooter and you’re likely to have Counter-Strike: GO, Overwatch or Fortnite suggested. A competitive sport game might have Rocket League thrown your way. RPG recommendations will see Skyrim, Mass Effect2, Divinity Original Sin, Fallout 4, World of Warcraft mentioned. Games anywhere from five to ten years old, but still played daily.

Now knock on the door of a board game community and ask for recommendations for a worker placement game, or a heavy euro. Or a gateway game. The chances are you’re going to find recommendations From the last year or two. This begs the question – what’s wrong with the games from five or ten years ago? Or perhaps a better question is:

What makes newer games better than the older ones?

It’s a tricky question to answer. Partially it’s about availability. Some games go out of print and it makes them difficult to find, so naturally it makes more sense to look for a game you’re likely to be able to find. The real reason the more recent games get recommended though, is because they’re better.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I know, and saying one game is objectively better than another is a pretty ballsy claim to make. In this case though, I think it’s true. Looking for a Dungeon Crawler? Gloomhaven, or Jaws of the Lion. Tableau Builder? Wingspan. Worker Placement? A Feast for Odin. Maybe you have more specific needs. You want a cutesy animal themed game? Everdell. Space horror action? Nemesis. What about the classics – something like an abstract game? Azul, The Isle of Cats, Sagrada.

For the record, none of those are just my opinion. These are the most popular answers from going back through months of recommendation requests in various groups. Why are these the games people are recommending? Here’s my take.

Games are getting better. And they’re getting better quickly.

The resurgence of board games in the last ten years is amazing. Popularity is booming, the scene is growing, and so is the amount of money being spent. Small publishers can get their games to market with services like Kickstarter, and there are a lot more designers making a name for themselves. It’s led to the systems and mechanisms being used in games to be continually refined. Along with this we’ve seen the emergence of online playtesting groups, grants, incentives, competitions, and rapid prototyping with software like Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia.

As an illustration of iteration and continuous improvement, the things we do in board games are getting refined, year on year. I’ll use Worker Placement as an example, as it’s my favourite mechanism. Worker placement has gone from quite basic games like Stone Age, through to games like A Feast For Odin, where a huge choice of worker spots is combined with polyomino tile laying. The same mechanism has been used in new ways in very recent games too, like Dune Imperium or The Lost Ruins of Arnak, both of which combine it with deck-building instead of abstract puzzles.

If you asked me if I wanted to play Stone Age, I’d never turn you down, but if you asked me to choose a worker placement game, I’d choose something like Nusfjord, Paladins of the West Kingdom or Everdell. Not overly complex games, but just more fun. More interesting. Ten years ago if you asked for a miniatures game, you’d have had Claustrophobia thrown at you, Hersoscape, or Descent. Now though, it’ll be Nemesis, Mechs vs Minions, Lords of Hellas. Quality is improving, and expectations are raising alongside it.

A Golden Age

We’re living in a real Golden Age for board games, card games, and tabletop games of all kinds. Production qualities are through the roof for the big releases, and at the other end of the spectrum small box games are getting self-published through Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. Classic games are getting the rules and artwork revisited and re-balanced. Most importantly though, designers are building on their own experience, and on building on the foundations laid by the greats like Dr Reiner Knizia, Vlaada Chvátil, Friedmann Friese, Alan R Moon etc, and they’re coming up with ways to keep games feeling fresh, new, improved – just ‘better’.

This, combined with the recent groundswell of support for better inclusion and diversity in our hobby – at all levels – means the future’s looking brighter than ever, and I can’t wait to see what the next ten years bring.

The post The Pace Of Progress appeared first on Punchboard.

It’s no big secret that I love a mystery. I’ve previously sung the praises of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective – I reviewed The Baker Street Irregulars a few months ago. My favourite genre of book is the Locked Room Mystery, those seemingly impossible murders, made popular a few years back over here by the excellent Jonathan Creek series. I love a murder mystery party, and when I manage to find the time, I’m also working my way through the Chronicles of Crime games.

The Case of the Missing Audience

Not being able to mix in numbers has caused a real problem for the performing arts. The idea of people sitting in a crowded hall or auditorium is unthinkable at the moment, which has left lots of groups without much in the way of options. It’s led to many of them looking to either come up with a new way of performing shows, or diversifying into something new.

I’ve looked at the first of these a few times now. I’ve covered online mysteries run by two different theatre companies now, and wrote reviews for Sherlock In Homes by Sharp Teeth Theatre, and A Deadly Dose by Play Dead London. These have all been excellent, I ended up doing a second show from Play Dead London, and I’m going to another by Sharp Teeth this weekend. Both companies run these over Zoom and have you interacting with the cast and trying to solve the mysteries, and I couldn’t recommend each of them highly enough. They’re fantastic alternatives to sitting around watching TV, and hysterical.

This past week however, I was contacted by someone from another group – After Dark Murder – who are branching out in a direction more closely aligned to my usual interests.

Murder On The Cards

After Dark Murder have created a card game based on the premise of a murder mystery. Ticks two very important boxes for me! They contacted me on Twitter and asked if I’d like a copy to review, and naturally, I jumped at the chance. The game in question is Foul Play, and thanks to it being simple to learn and play, I’ve managed to pack in a few plays already, and wanted to tell you all what I think.

Mini-Review – Foul Play

Foul Play fits in a standard size card box, and manages to squeeze in two full variants of the game, as well as all of the instructions and references, into 56 cards. It plays from 2-5 players, and moves pretty quickly once it gets going. It’s a murder mystery, set in Edwardian England, seeing players race to unmask the killer.

The standard variant is called Good Cop. A ‘crime scene’ grid of 3×3 cards is laid out on the table, and everyone has a hand of cards. On your turn you either play a card for its action – e.g. steal a card from another player – or discard one. Then, you draw another from the deck. That’s as difficult as player turns are. Some of the cards let you swap a card in your hand with one of the face-down cards in the crime scene, so remembering what you put where is crucial.

In among the cards are three evidence cards, drawn in secret and at random from a choice of 15. Your aim is to cycle through as many cards as possible until you’ve seen all three, then to find the suspect card that matches all three of the descriptions on them, then make your big reveal! The Bad Cop variant plays very similarly, but all the pieces of evidence are in the deck, and to win you need to be holding a suspect and three matching pieces of evidence in your hand. It doesn’t matter who gets accused, as long as the evidence points to them!

Final Thoughts

Foul Play is one of those games where you play it, and wonder why no-one has done it before. Once you get the hang of it, which takes all of two minutes, turns fly around. You find yourself trying to read the other peoples’ faces when they pick up a card, looking for tell-tale signs of disappointment or excitement, and trying to remember what colour the back of that card was.

Having a good memory is vital (or a piece of paper and a pen and somewhere to hide it from prying eyes), as you’re trying to keep track of lots of things at once. You need to remember what evidence you’ve seen, and what it said. You need to remember where – and what – you put in the crime scene. The card abilities that let you look at swap cards at random, or even look at everyone’s hand at once, really spice things up and keep the pace up.

I really enjoyed Foul Play. It’s fast, easy (although tricky after a couple of glasses of Port), and it’s a game that feels like one of those that’s been in a family for years already. It takes up no real space, it’s cheap (less than £9), and I genuinely really like it. It feels a bit like it’s distilled Cluedo – without the board. If you’re looking for a filler or something to play with the family, or to take anywhere for a quick blast, I really recommend it. It’s also a great way to support another business during these unusual times.

Review copy provided by After Dark Murder. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The post Mystery Ingenuity appeared first on Punchboard.

Taken in isolation, that could sound really short-sighted, and not the sort of thing you’d expect from a real fan of board games. It doesn’t matter how old a game is, surely? A good game is a good game is a good game, right? If that’s the case though, why aren’t we all buying, playing and talking games released ten years ago? Or five? Heck, even two years ago?

One reason is the advancement of the hobby, but that’s a story for another blog entry. For now I’m going to look a five words that annoy me.

The Cult of the New

Cult of the New is a term that’s thrown around a lot in hobby spaces, particularly games. Not just in board games, but video games too. It refers to the hype when a new game launches, and is a relatively recent phenomenon. The buzz that’s generated when enough people start talking about something new can really snowball, and before you know it, you desperately want that hot, new game you hadn’t heard of a week ago.

Social media has a massive role to play in this hype. From the moment we wake up we’re looking at a screen of one kind or another, and voluntarily bathing in social media’s screen light for hours every day. Have a look at these figures, some of those statistics are shocking. Highlights for me (if highlight is the right word) are:

• As of March 2019, Snapchat reached 90% of all 13-24 year-olds and 75% of all 13-34-year-olds in the US.
• In 2019, the average amount of time spent on social media is 2 hours and 22 minutes per day.
• By 2020, Instagram is expected to reach 120.3 million monthly active users in the US.
• There are about 25 million business profiles on Instagram.

Take a look at those numbers, and bear in mind some of them are a couple of years old now too, Consider the sheer amount of money thrown at targeted advertising (adverts in your feed, chosen based on what they know you like), and indirect (businesses working with your favourite influencers/bloggers/whoever). Whether you like it or not, you’re going to be aware of the current hotness. You’ll probably find you start wanting it too.

What does this mean for board games?

It means that some truly great games are rarely going to scroll past your eyes. When you’ve got ten, twenty, thirty people all posting about how great Some New Game is, and one person singing the praises of the game they love from a couple of years ago, it gets lost in the noise. So much of the hype happens regardless of how good the actual game is too. There’s real FOMO (fear of missing out) or wanting to be seen fitting in with influencers, going all-in on massive Kickstarter pledges, so people get swept up in the hype without even trying to find out if they’ll like it.

If you want to see some proof of this, take a look at your favourite local Facebook board game buying and selling group. Kickstarters land in homes, tons of pictures go up with photos of Some New Game and how exciting and amazing it is. Then within a month or so the sales posts start. What I found shocking at first (I’m used to it now) is how many of these sales are of boxes still in their shrink. These are games which people have often dropped £100-200 on, waited a year or more for, and now they’re selling it without even having played it. Why?

You could argue that they found they found they suddenly need the money, but most of the time these games were paid for a loooong time ago. At one point, something convinced them they really wanted – even needed – this game, and now it’s being sold with either one or two plays, and often without even being opened. Board games aren’t alone in this, far from it, but I think it causes a problem.

Defining ‘a problem’

When I say ‘a problem’, I should probably qualify it. I’m coming at it from the viewpoint of a hobbyist, and a lover of tabletop games. I’m passionate about the hobby, I have strong opinions about the games I love and dislike, and I want to see more people enjoying the same games that I do. The global board game industry is expected to be worth more than $12B in a couple of years time, which means a lot more people playing these games.

The vast majority of the people spending all of that money will be buying something plastic, with a current hot franchise plastered all over it, and that’s okay. There’ll always be kids pulling boogers out of plastic noses, clearing up poop after a plastic dog, and people playing the millionth iteration of Monopoly.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing. A great thing. I’m not an elitist who doesn’t want to see the masses getting into the hobby, for fear of them all just playing Monopoly. Play what you enjoy, that’s my ethos. My worry – for want of a better word – is that so many wonderful games will just fly under the radar and people will never discover that same joy as I have in them.

Big and small publishers alike will continue to use Kickstarter to drum up money for games they’ll publish anyway, and I’ll probably buy some of them. I just want to make sure great games aren’t missed.

My Mission

Mission is maybe too strong a word, I’m not sure, but the intent is the same. I’ve decided that I want to use my site to make sure I’m not just following the trend of ‘look at this new hotness’. I will be covering new games – I did that plenty last year – but they’ll be games I want to play, not feel like I should play to bend to the will of the hype train. You’ll seldom see American-style mini-heavy games here, because I tend not to play them, and because I don’t have enough experience of them. I don’t think my opinion on them could, or should matter as much. But if there’s a new heavy Euro, you better believe I’ll be playing it, then telling you folk all about it. Just like I did in the last year with Bonfire, Praga, Merv and Viscounts.

What I really feel strongly about, however, is covering games that are older. Maybe just two or three years older, maybe more. My audience is growing, and I want to make sure I’m letting people know about games they should be playing if they share tastes with me, So, as well as new things, and as well as occasional different styles of game being reviewed here, I’m going to make sure I’m telling you all about the games that are still worth your attention, even if they don’t always get the love they deserve.

Play what you enjoy, and have fun everyone.

The post Fighting The Hype appeared first on Punchboard.

The Here And Now

If you’ve been reading recently, you’ll have seen I’ve written quite a few reviews. A lot of them have been recent games which I bought because I either loved the theme and designers, or because I got swept up in a bit of the hype. It’s probably a bit of both if I’m honest. I really enjoy Merv, Praga Caput Regni, and Viscounts of the West Kingdom though, so new or not, I’m glad I covered them.

The most recent review however, was a bit of a special one for me. Yes, Euphoria ticks all the boxes for me (worker placement, quirky theme, dice as workers), but it also marked milestone for me. It was the first game that’s ever been sent to me, for free, for me to review, and I’m extremely grateful to Stonemaier Games for the opportunity. As it turns out, I love it, and really enjoyed it, and I’m especially glad I bought the expansion for myself to go with it.

I’ve seen my following on Twitter and Instagram grow, and I’ve met (for want of a better term) a lot of really nice people. I now no longer feel like an absolute outsider to the board game community at large. Now, I’m more like the guy who got in to a party full of much cooler people, trying to fit in.

So what now? Rest on my laurels, be happy with that, and tick along? Nosireebob, not on your nelly. Here’s what I’m up to now.

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century!

I’m showing my age there a bit, but that sums it up nicely – Future Times!

Never one to stand still, I’m constantly trying to learn something new. I guess you could call that self-improvement? With that in mind, I saw a tweet scroll past a few weeks ago from the Tabletop Mentorship scheme, and promptly signed up. I told them I want to improve my writing, and my reach with my content, and found out this week that I’d been matched up with my new mentor – Iain from The Giant Brain (go and read it, I won’t be offended, it’s good stuff). We met up today, and as well as being a thoroughly nice chap, he’s given me some great advice, and we’ve already decided on some things to try. Hopefully that’ll become evident over the coming weeks.

I’ve been cheeky, some might say, and proffered myself out to lots of different publishers, testing the water to see what’s involved with becoming a listed reviewer for them, So far, the feedback’s been surprisingly good.

I’ve had what I expected – “We want someone with a much bigger audience and reach, come back when you’re that” – and that’s fair enough. They’re running a business after all, and know their target audience.

I’ve also had the slightly-better-than-expected – “We’re looking for bigger, but we know you have to start somewhere, so here are some digital codes to run giveaways with to grow your audience“. Pretty cool, I thought.

Then, I’ve had the completely unexpected, where publishers have been keen to work with me, asked for my details, and I currently have several games on their way to me over the next couple of months, with the promise of more to come. This is pretty mind-blowing to me, I didn’t expect anything like this, and I’m very happy about it.

Like, seriously pleased.

Changes Coming Soon

With all of that in mind, here’s what that means for Punchboard Reviews in the near future.

• I’m still going to be buying the majority of my own games to cover, and you better believe there’s going to be a lot of heavy euro, worker placement, dice-related shenanigans going on for the stuff I love and can’t get enough of.
  
• Transparency. Any time a game is provided to me to review, I’ll be up-front and tell you in the review. Note that this isn’t the same thing as being sponsored. No-one is paying me to write nice things about their cardboard offspring, so if I have problems with a game, I’ll tell you.
  
• Blogging. As part of my mentoring, I’ve been encouraged to post with a more regular schedule, and apparently people like getting to know the actual me, so expect some regular updates like this one.
  
• Short-form reviews. As you’ll know if you’ve subjected yourself to my reviews before, once I start talking about something I like, it can get away from me. My reviews have a habit of running in the thousands of words. Moving forward, when I love a game, and have a lot to say about it, I still will. But for games that maybe don’t need three thousand words, I’m going to try boiling some of it down and getting to the interesting stuff faster, and leave you with more time to scroll through Twitter, write a novel, mow the lawn – whatever else it is you could be doing.

Thanks for the support so far folks, here’s to 2021.

The post Onwards & Upwards appeared first on Punchboard.

Why Bother?

That’s the first question I asked myself. Is there really any point in making videos? Primarily, so far, I’ve enjoyed writing reviews and adding photos. I’m not in this for fame and glory etc etc, but it’s a nice idea to be well-received and have your viewpoint respected. There’s a lot of competition around for board game reviewing, and the majority make videos. I’ve never made a proper video before, so I thought this might sate my appetite for learning something new, and maybe help with getting known.

Where To Start?

This was the first question I had to ask myself. I didn’t want to spend much money on something I might not get on well with, so my first goal was getting started on the cheap. With that in mind, this is the hardware and software I opted for, and have used for both reviews so far:

• Softbox – I bought a softbox for lighting from eBay. A softbox is a very bright lamp on a stand with a diffuser in front of it. It adds lots of light to a scene without casting strong shadows.
• Camera – I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a camera, so I learned how to use the one on my phone. It’s pretty decent, an Honor 20 with a 4K rear camera, so for now it was both reasonable quality, and didn’t cost me anything.
• Tripod – I bought a cheap, lightweight tripod from Amazon, along with a phone mount, to hold my phone during filming.
• Lavalier microphone – audio is so important in videos, that’s what my research and personal opinion taught me, so I spent around £15 on a lapel lavalier mic.
• Editing software – Davinci Resolve is amazing video-editing software, and you can get it for free. There’s quite a learning curve, but a vast amount of tutorials and resources on YouTube and their own forums.
• Audio editing – another freebie here, the veteran Audacity. Again, it’s worth finding some tutorials, but the results are worth it if you need to do lots of audio clean-up.

From there, I decided the best thing to do was to dive in headfirst and start filming. I wrote a basic list of the shots I wanted, and things I wanted to say in Simplenote, and got going.

It’s Not Easy

Those three words sum up my experiences in filming the first review, PARKS. I made a lot of mistakes, and learned a lot of lessons. I must have re-shot the main gameplay video and introduction at least five times each, for a variety of reasons. Out-of-focus video, using the wrong mic, bad lighting direction causing reflection off the game, hitting the table and shaking the camera, using the wrong lens on the phone. Not to mention nerves and stumbling over my words far too often.

In the end, I did manage to create something I wasn’t entirely unhappy with, but I had a long list of things I wanted to do differently for the next video.

[yotuwp type=”videos” id=”BAa_mnekNAs” ]

Take Two

I went into the filming of the Nemo’s War video armed with a lot better idea of what worked and what didn’t for me. It took me way too long to get the footage I needed, and started thinking about why.

[yotuwp type=”videos” id=”ARHXpFkTikU” ]

I re-shot so many things, so looked at the causes. Bad lighting, bad focus, stumbling over words, that sort of thing. I also spent so long trying to sort out the audio. I realised what I needed to improve was my workflow. Once I realised that, I set out to improve it and it worked, the shooting for Nemo took a fraction of the time. Here’s what I changed.

Storyboard

I needed a more visual way to lay out what I wanted to film and to say, and Simplenote – while amazing for lists and other planning – just didn’t do it for me. I use lots of planning boards in my job, so I went with something similar to that – Google Jamboard. It’s the equivalent of having a whiteboard and a load of post-it notes, and it really helped me sort myself out.

Workflow

I’m forced to record my audio and video separately at the moment, as my phone (despite many adapters) does not want to recognise my lav mic as an external microphone. For the first video I shot video and recorded audio at the same time, then started editing the audio before anything else. What that meant however, is that I ended up chopping tons of little pauses and noises out.

Davinci Resolve has an amazing tool to sync a video and audio track automatically, but that only works if they both have roughly the same audio. You can see where I’m going with this… By the time I’d edited my audio I had to make so many cuts to my video to get it to all match up. I didn’t need to dive in as deep as I did with the audio, compressing and normalising it all before getting it into Resolve. Resolve has plenty of good audio tools, I just need to get more familiar with it.

Improvement

Just by making those couple of changes, the whole experience was much better for me. It was less stressful, not as disheartening, and much, much smoother. It’s hard to quantify exactly how much difference it made, but it took me far less time from having all the raw footage to having a rendered video uploading to YouTube.

I’m much happier with the second video, but very grateful to the first for what I learned. I’ve still got a long way to go before I’m properly happy with it, but I hope for more incremental improvement as I go now. There you have it, a bit of a ramble I know, but that’s where I am now, with a whole three (count ’em!) subscribers.

The post Adventures In YouTube appeared first on Punchboard.