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As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter?
Mark is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges, educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason, and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more.
Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan.
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Some articles that fed our discussion included:
- “The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism” by Luke Winkie
- “Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular” by Darron Cummings
- “8 Historical Board Games, from Diverse Designers, That Show Great Promise” by Charlie Hall
- “How a Board Game About Birds Became a Surprise Blockbuster” by Dan Kois
- “How Classic Board Games Are Bringing Families Closer During the Pandemic” by Drew Weisholtz
- “Keep Your Game Night Rolling (At A Safe Distance) With These 3 Online Services” by Petra Mayer
The two games Tommy created that we bring up are Secret Hitler and Inhuman Conditions.
This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop, or now you can sign up directly via Apple Podcasts for a subscription for ad-free and bonus material for three of Mark’s podcasts together on the Mark Lintertainment Podcasts Channel.
This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network and is curated by openculture.com.
You should cover the new Dune movie, and the old David Lynch movie. Maybe talk about how you talked about covering David Cronenberg before but never got around to it (maybe in a joking way). Also, no Halloween episode? Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, and All Souls Day have passed. Take maybe a week to get some David Lynch and David Cronenberg people together (in the spirit of PMP they can be David Lynch or Cronenberg scholars, or just obsessive fans, or…a mix of the two…and you could have two episodes done), heck if you really need it take two weeks.
Yep, we’ve now recorded on Dune… it’ll see daylight in a few weeks.
Switching to every-other-week recording has made it hard to fit in things like holiday episodes. I see Cronenberg looks like he’ll have a new film out at some point: https://www.indiewire.com/2021/04/david-cronenberg-sci-fi-movie-crimes-of-the-future-shoot-1234633841/. I’ll see if I can get a group to talk about that. (Do you want in?)