Games on Addison: TableTop Day!

Today we recount and bid farewell to another successful TableTop Day, where we gathered together for the specific purpose of playing more games.

99f7ab00d896a77954636d6c8de3cd8b-225x225International TableTop Day grew out of the TableTop web series on the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel. In celebration of the series’ one-year anniversary, producers Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, and Boyan Radakovich created a day to get players together to celebrate and engage in tabletop gaming. This year was the third annual TableTop Day, and Saturday, April 11th, saw a plethora of opportunities for the Chicago gamer. All of the city’s big game stores (Chicagoland Games, Cat & Mouse, Wanderer’s Refuge) offered events and demos at each of their locations, and Geek Bar Beta had a full day of food, drinks and gaming.

For our group, the plethora of options was a blessing. Four of the Addison Recorder’s writers (joined by a husband and wee baby) all ventured out to play this past Saturday — and each person had a different availability. Because TableTop Day has become so big, and because we had so many options, we were able to accommodate more schedules than we could in years past. [Read more…]

Games on Addison: Working the Board

When I’m looking for some serious tabletop enjoyment, I want to work.

Well, I don’t want to work — I want to strategically place little wooden meeples on a board, and gain the benefits from that strategic placement. In short, when I want some deeply-satisfying board game action, I often look to worker placement games.

meeple-stone-age-board-game

“We’re here to kick ass and… allow you to roll a die and claim an amount of food relative to the result of said roll. Yeah.”

[Read more…]

Games on Addison: Kickstarter & Board Games

kickstarter-badge-fundedKickstarter has been a mixed blessing for the tabletop gaming industry. It provides a platform for small publishers and indie designers to get their game in front of more eyes than previously possible. It can give bigger publishers and distributors a barometer of how popular a game might be. It can give creators of any background to fund a dream project.

Or it can be a platform that enables unprepared creators to crash and burn while trying to handle thousands of dollars of other people’s money.

With a recent influx of board game Kickstarters that have recently launched, funded, or fulfilled their rewards, it’s a perfect time to look at not just the games, but how they utilized this platform. [Read more…]