Not to clog up the TL with too many saucy pics, but here is my non-exhaustive 'sizzle reel' of games acquired during lockdown which have seen little to no IRL play. I'm looking for partners, when safe & legal. First, adorable tessellating kitty-stacking mini dex game KITTIN.
From the same makers, TINDERBLOX. Take it in turns building a little wooden campfire with coloured blocks & tweezers. Like reverse Jenga. Played with my daughter this morning - it's ruddy hard! Very quick, tricky filler. Maybe good as a tie-breaker / turn-order-decider.
SIDEREAL CONFLUENCE. Big multiplayer space trading game, where you're all doing deals to exchange resources to put through weird conversion engines to get better resources. I really negotiation games! Not sure whether the asymmetry forces a strategy on you but eager to find out.
CLEOPATRA & THE SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTS - a massive model palace to build, + set collection & a single blind-bid auction that can decide the game. Huge table presence for a relatively short game. Lots of positional crunch: mixes luck with tricky timing decisions.
ERA is another game with a ridiculous table presence. It might be the world's biggest roll n write? Roll dice, build your own fiefdom, try not to get raided or ravaged by plague (or flooded, in the expansion). It's basically renfaire YAHTZEE on steroids.
RAPA NUI is a game of giant statue logistics. Carve maui out of the quarry & carry them to the coast. That's it. It's light, quite fun. Not sure there's loads of depth or variation but it's not horrible, grindy or dull, just... pretty chill & unstressful?
GINKGOPOLIS has the weirdest theme - building ecofriendly housing communes in the future. The theme doesn't really come through but mostly it's about area control & outmanuevering opponents. It's quite thinky & while some groups will hate it I suspect a few will LOVE it.
Still haven't played RED OUTPOST, a game about running a Soviet space colony. You share workers with other players; you're trying to make workers most associated with you happy while maybe making workers your comrades are responsible for a little bit less happy. Looks intriguing!
DERANGED is a semi-coop gothic survival game with a very obvious heritage of BETRAYAL, DEAD OF WINTER & WEREWOLF. Not a bad pedigree, though they're not my fave games. Still, if this can build on those elements, with the right group it might prove to be amazing.
SURVIVE has been in my collection years, but the shiny shrinkwrap may give away that this is the 30-year-anniversary reprint. Big fan of this silly, well-designed game of escaping a sinking island, while feeding your opponents to sharks, etc. Meeples are fiddly, but otherwise 😘
Finally, just arrived: GENOTYPE. Look at that embossed foil writing! The wrinkly peas are embossed too! It's a worker placement game about Mendelian genetics. Be a monk. Plant some peas. Record your discoveries. That's the game. Is it good? I need to play it to find out!
So that's it. Those are the games I'm sitting on. Fingers crossed soonish some species of permissible outdoor proximity will allow for roadtesting these or others. I do like a good boardgame with nice people.

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More from @TimClarePoet

28 Mar
Cults are a critique of society. We ogle & mock folks who fall for them, but the classic profile of people who join is someone who is lost, traumatised, struggling for identity. Nothing in the emptiness of late capitalism speaks to them. Cults thrive because we're bad at meaning.
'Wow, how could so many people put their faith in such an obvious con artist?' Well, maybe because they were pretending to offer a bunch of stuff contemporary society utterly fails to provide. Direct confrontation with our fears. Validation. Deep purpose. Community.
'Cult' has a hygienic specificity that suggests pathological false beliefs & behaviours exist Over There. Whereas, of course, these beliefs & behaviours exist on a spectrum. We all belong to communities & subcultures with dogma, rules, punishments & outgroups.
Read 15 tweets
28 Mar
I'd be really interested to see a breakdown of the top 2 or 3 best avenues for book promo by genre. We talk about promoting 'books' like they're a monolith, but I suspect the way Kindle crime readers find new reads is different to how nonfiction pop psych readers find theirs.
I'm sure there are *some* common channels across all types of book, but there must be some that only exist for, say, indie Romance authors, or SFF authors, or litfic authors, or authors writing sports biography or whatever. I'd love to get a sense of those different networks.
I love how some books can be selling like gangbusters, despite being completely unknown elsewhere, because of a community's spreading the word. Later, sometimes they spill out of their niche. But it's fascinating & exciting to me how different books spread.
Read 8 tweets
27 Mar
I get like 3 or 4 weird or inappropriate emails a year from (presumably) listeners of the podcast. Mostly they're lovely. But I bet I'd have to deal with a bunch more if I weren't a chap/white. Extra condescension, creepiness, presumptions & outright abuse. An emotional tax.
I know most folks are only too aware of this. I just, in my own slow, knuckleheaded way was like 'huh, harassing or weird messages are kind of rare for me!' even though I get a lot of emails. Then I realised some people probably have to continually actively filter.
Obviously I expect certain types of content attract more odd/abusive correspondence than others. Also I guess podcasts are an opt-in medium? It's not like 'what's this shite Radio 4's forcing on me now? Tim Clare?' Come to think of it I got more abuse when I did live radio
Read 4 tweets
27 Mar
Somehow I've managed to acquire 4 new boardgames in the last week. I'm starting to feel under seige. Really need cups of tea, components in ramekins & some patient company to try them all out!
I *think* I'd like to write a book about games, but as always the challenge is thinking of a way that would be rewarding for the reader & for me. I mean, I really enjoy peanut butter & jam sandwiches but I don't think I could spin that out into a book.
(a *good* book, that is. I can digress so intensely I bet, if one doesn't already exist, I could find an entire book in pbj sandwiches)
Read 6 tweets
27 Mar
The openings of THE HOBBIT by JRR Tolkien & THE 39 STEPS by Richard Hannay. Very tonally distinct, despite their being essentially the same story: grumpy recluse is forced into embarking on a big game of hide & seek, at the end of which, war breaks out. ImageImage
I don't know why I said THE 39 STEPS was by Richard Hannay. It's John Buchan, obviously. Richard Hannay is his protagonist! Although it's *told* by Hannay, just as THE HOBBIT is, nominally, based on the record as written by Bilbo Baggins.
The main difference between the two characters, aside from height, is that Bilbo is very happy in his hole, whereas Hannay wants to clamber out. Richard Hannay is one of the least likeable, most misanthropic, xenophobic, carping protagonists in all popular fiction.
Read 4 tweets
26 Mar
The opening of Nancy Mitford's THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. I love this paragraph so much. It doesn't introduce plot, just voice & characters. Your hook needn't be a pistol pressed to the protag's head. Uncle Matthew is one of my favourite comic characters. Image
Uncle Matthew, we're told, has a tendency to write the name of whoever he's angry with on a scrap of paper & put it in a drawer somewhere, apparently in the belief that doing so will hasten their death. The drawers round the house are full of pieces of paper with various names on
He likes munching on pigs' brains, which he eats like peanuts & offers to guests on a platter, saying: 'Pig's thinker?'
Read 4 tweets

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