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Tag Archives: Tabletopia

How do you find out about new games?

Chubby Unicorn and I were talking about games recently (shocking, I know). The topic of where we find out about games came up. We’ve mentioned that we’ve backed a few games through Kickstarter (as evidenced by the Kickstarter tag), but how did we find out about those games?

Some of those came from just browsing Kickstarter itself, specifically the Tabletop Games section, but in general the basis is BoardGameGeek.com. The site is a wealth of information, and there are many folks who delight in posting about upcoming games. One source I enjoy is the BoardGameGeek News blog. I also “subscribe” to many games on the site, which means when a new forum post is made I’ll get a notification on the site. Often this will just be folks asking rules questions, but you will also find rumors of a new expansion or new game from the same publisher.

The better source of information is usually direct emails from the Publisher/Designer/Game Company. Most of these folks have a mailing list you can join and they do NOT abuse it (at least not the ones I have been on), generally only sending emails out when they are working on a new game, prepping for a kickstarter, or the like. These emails are often the first time I hear about a new game or expansion.

Lately, the news updates from the Tabletopia on Steam have also been showing me some new games and piquing my interest.

To summarize, I find out about my new games through:

  1. Newsletter Emails from publishers/designers/game companies
  2. BoardGameGeek News on BoardGameGeek.com and subscriptions
  3. Tabletopia Announcements through Steam
  4. Browsing Tabletop Games on Kickstarter.com

What about you?
Where do you find out about new games?
Let us know in the comments.

Terra Mystica on Tabletopia

This is the third in a four part series on Terra Mystica. In today’s entry I’ll talk about playing Terra Mystica on Tabletopia.

Professor and I have played around with Tabletopia a few times. The first full game we played with it was Dinosaur Island. It took a little getting used to. Thankfully there’s a feature that lets you have hotkeys to zoom in on different parts of the game, which also helps with moving around a larger game space. Once you get the hang of the clicking and dragging, that’s no big deal, though I do think that lengthens game play a bit. There’s a little bit of an issue with pieces locking into place. I was trying to put three workers on a space, but apparently there wasn’t enough room to lock them all in, so one locked on the space and the other two went flying across the board! It was really funny, but I can see it getting frustrating.

We also played around a little with Terra Mystica, which I found easier to navigate. It could be because I’d already played another game with Tabletopia, and I’ve played Terra Mystica multiple times, but the biggest thing was that I didn’t feel like I needed to zoom in. I could move my pieces and get my resources and see everything at once. I really liked that.

We were able to play a full game of Terra Mystica with President Gamer and Shutter, who now live across the country from us. This was really exciting, since it had been almost a year since the last time we’d gamed with them. We sent them the info on Tabletopia and Terra Mystica and set up a gaming date.

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