Yes, totally looking forward to 2+2 – WsdV is among my wife’s and my favorites, a really great game. And to be able to play that with one of our game groups will be lots of fun.

currently our go-to abstract for two is The Duke. The flipping pieces give it a nicw twist that undermines my chess-schooled brain quite a bit and gives my wife a solid chance to snag victory from me. I allready have Tak waiting, though, for some alternatives. Other than that: Battle Line and Red7 are more or less abstracts, too, and we enjoy them quite a bit. But it is hard to convince my wife to play abstracts, so I don’t own many of them.

God, Boardgame Brawl still to this day posts videos with out-of-focus components. He is doing it for years and still doesn’t get it right nor reshooting those parts. It’s not hard science, dude, learn your equipment!

SUaSD and NPI both have this stupid idea that pushing/throwing pieces around is funny. Nope, it isn’t, at keast not if you do it as often as you do. It irks me, when I see people clumsily or pretend-clumsily shove around pieces and break the setup. It doesn’t add to neither value nor tone of the review. But well, I can look over it if the review provides value, but it is probably why I relegate those two channels more to the boardgame-clowns faction than as valuable information sources. Fun to watch every now and then, especially about games I allready know about, but rarely a source when looking for information about a game, as that gets lost in the “funny”. Same as inside the box, great channel, just not great source of info about a game.

Man vs Meeples is mire the board game evening news to me than an actual review channel. Tidbits from the hobby, pointers for games I might want to go in on further, stuff like that. I like their super smooth production, really, the amateurish clobbered togetherness of some reviewers gets to me sometimes. I like that thwir thing is on the shorter side, too. As I said, the equivalent of the evening news. Especially when they have guests. I’ve never gone to a MvM vid when I wanted to know about a game specificially, but I have gone for more infos on a game after several MvM videos.

I really like it, but somehiw it never hits the table. It might be the fiddlyness – all that conversion stuff happenong – and the different decks to know, it just feels overly complicated for what it does. 51st State Master Set feels kinda the same (no wonder, same game system) with even more stuff added with the contact tokens. I really like the system, but most people I teach it to, I notice they just don’t “get it” – which ends with them not really enjiying it. Maybe this is one of thise games you really have to play repeatedly to really enjoy it. Will give one of them a new chance on our weekly game night nontheless, maybe it finally will click for others.

I love the golden ages, but I think some parts are a bit limited if you look at it with the 4x perspective – there is no real epic feel especially to the exterminate and explore parts. It does very well if you just go for “civ builder in 2 hours”, though. It is – to me – more akin to Scythe and other civ-like euro games. As said, I love to play it, but I think someone explicitly asking for a 4X best-of game might feel that it is a bit lacking.