Update

Update – August 2018

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If anyone out there is still reading or looking at this blog, then this update would be directed at you.

I realized that since my last update post I have failed completely at everything I wanted to achieve for the blog. Dave and I even talked about taking it down since neither or us were writing on it. However, as the blog represents two years of hard work together, as well as a little over one year of me writing alone with Dave doing administrative and maintenance work, we decided that we’d keep it if only for the fact that we don’t want to lose the record of the work we put in.

I had hoped that last year would be a good blog year, but suffice it to say, I had a very difficult year for a mixture of reasons and it simply didn’t happen. HOWEVER! I have a new plan. My new aim is to post once a month on a game not reviewed here before and at the same time try to research into old games and so on so that every so often I can put up a slightly different post.

I’m not going to make an official timeline or impose any strict deadlines upon myself, because I think that’s a sure way to fail. But I am going to try and refresh the blog a bit over the next two-three months, because I really miss writing on it and playing lots of board games.

Watch this space!

 

Over and out~

Mim

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Update – We’re Back…Well Sort Of!

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I’m back (David). Having finished wandering around Wales I’m back and hopefully ready to get back on schedule.

This is what Wales looked like!
This is what Wales looked like!

Unfortunately my sister is still wandering around Europe somewhere but I should still be able to get us back on track. I will make sure reviews go up on Mondays and hopefully the ones we missed will go up in between. Until then heres a nice video I made of my time in Wales, its mostly just shots of various animals and no games at all. But for people who like that kind of thing should be nice, also for people who like that kind of thing they should check out my girlfriends blog on nature stuff Here!

Update – Sorry We Fail!

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Due to holidayness we have failed to play enough games to do all the reviews! My sister’s gone wandering across Europe and I’m about to go wandering across Wales. So I must apologise that we will not be able to publish our reviews as promised in the June Update post. But we will review Trivial Pursuit and Know it All in July; as well as the Kids Games month we had planned. But until early-mid July it’s unlikely we’ll achieve anything.

I take great solace in the fact that I doubt anyone really cares but great pride in the fact that probably more anyones care than those that would have cared around 5 months ago!

Anywa;y I hope you all have wonderful holidays planned, with plenty of games and craziness! So this is goodbye for at least two weeks or so… Hopefully less, but I make no promises.

Update – May 2014

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So this month we’re going to do something that might be considered a little boring… We hope you agree that it’s not, but this month is Classic Games Month! Obviously we’ll try to put give fun and interesting take on them and it should be good as we have just ordered a video camera… So (hopefully) our first fun video will go up this month, depending on time. We tried to think of the most monolithic and iconic games we could think of. Here’s what we came up with:

All the games for this month!
All the games for this month!

Games for May: – Classic Games

Monday the 5th – Monopoly

Monday the 12th – Clue

Monday the 19th – Scrabble

Monday the 26th – Battleships

Other Things to Note:

  • As you may have noticed the site structure has change just a little, with the Games We Have and Games We Want pages now being subcategories of the Games We… page. On top of that there’s the new Games We’ve Made page, which is very small at the moment but will get bigger soon.
  • This is because we’ve published the rules to a card game we’ve invented called Crush the Crown! Check it out and let us know what you think.
  • Also we FINALLY have a video camera (it arrived today, so I’m super excited) so expect cool videos soon.
  • Lastly we’re going to the UK Board Games Expo at the end of this month so expect some awesome posts about that.

The Stoning of Mark Meaning…or the Meaning of Marker Stones!

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I’m writing this post because the last review post (Spartacus: A Game of Blood and Treachery) before this was our 50th post! YAY! Also March was full of marker stones; we passed 1000 views (and then 1600), we gained 40 followers (and then 47), 3 months of meeting deadlines without failure (please don’t jinx it), over half a year of blogging, our highest view/visitors in one day record so far… And our highest amount of views in one month by quite a lot!

Thud Mile Stone!
Thud Mile Stone!

Now, to some of this, you might go “HA! it’s taken them over half a year to even have 1000 people look at their blog” well to you I say… It’s a board game blog, not exactly current events or something with fire in it. We understand that in many respects what we blog about is quite niche and probably not something people will want to read every post of. It’s more likely that people will find the posts when they’re looking up particular games (or at least we hope so) which makes subscribing to our blog less likely than say, a blog on food or sport. So the 1000 marker stone is quite a big one for us, especially when you consider we’re not the only people existing in this niche, there are many other board game review sites/blogs that make cool exciting videos (we’re working on that) not to mention Board Game Geek which dominates the landscape for all board game knowledge.

Thank you

So really what I’m saying to anyone reading this is thanks a lot! It’s very encouraging to see progress, to see that, even though it’s slow, you’re making progress, the amount of views we get per day is steadily increasing. We haven’t had no views in a day in a very long time and getting less than 5 is now rare. We’re well on our way to 2000 views, in the same month that we hit 1000, that’s pretty nice going. You could say “Don’t judge it all by the statistics” but what’s the point of writing if no one reads it? The statistics let us know someone’s reading, and that means there’s point in writing.

Update – April 2014

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This month is going to be Card month! Yes I know there are enough card games in existence to fill a whole blog just with card games but we’ve picked a few of our favorites, a couple of classics and a couple of less classics, and perhaps we’ll do another card month next year and do a few more games. Also these posts will probably be quite short in comparison to our other posts as the games are mostly quite small and simple in comparison.

All the Games for this month...and our awesome card shuffler...if you don't have one get one.
All the Games for this month…and our awesome card shuffler…if you don’t have one get one. Also our awesome custom Tame the Board Game cards.

Games for April: – Cards!

Monday the 7th – Switch also known as Blackjack

Monday the 14th – Five Card Draw Poker with our Jack Daniels Poker set

Monday the 21st – Pit

Monday the 28th – Irish Snap

Other Things to Note:

  • As you may have noticed we’ve added a picture of all the games of this month to this update, this will now be a common thing with every update post.
  • Rules to our very own card game Crush the Crown will be going up sometime this month (hopefully) and we’ll be asking for feed back. All you need is a standard deck of cards and a friend so get ready!
  • Also we have gone back through all our old posts and added our ratings of them and updated the games we have page accordingly.
  • This month we’re also thinking of starting to hyper-link inside the posts so from an index at the top you’ll be able to jump to any section of the posts. We hope this will make the layout more accessible.
  • Penultimate we have to put a huge thanks out to grognard.com who are a website all about war games! Thanks to them posting our posts our viewing has gone through the roof this month and there’ll be a post specifically on that tomorrow. So go check them out.
  • Because of this we have decided to: a) include links to other suggested reviews of that game in out posts from now on (if there are any) and b) in the update post for each month a few links of websites that will be worth checking out inline with that months theme. So below this you’ll find some suggested sites.

Sites on Cards:

  • Pagat.com – For any and (mostly) all card game rules for any games you wanna play.

  • Card Game Reviews Blog – Not the most imaginative name for a blog but a solid site for card game reviews and somewhat fitting after my comment: “there are enough card games in existence to fill a whole blog just with card games”.

  • Play Some Card Games Online – And finally a place where you can play some card games online.

Update – February 2014

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This month is going to be themed Terry Pratchett month (or more like, board games inspired by works of Terry Pratchett) but that’s somewhat long winded! If anyone reading this is unaware of Terry Pratchett and his works, you must be educated now! Start by clicking THIS hyper link and picking a book, then buy it, then start reading. You could start at the beginning (a very good place to start) with The Colour of Magic. Then watch at least a couple of the films made from his books (I would suggest Hogfather followed by Going Postal) then even perhaps find the stop motion version of Truckers (which you can watch on YouTube HERE) and watch that (its not half bad) and then watch the animated TV series of Wyrd Sisters and of Soul Music. And after all that perhaps even listen to the Steeleye Span album Wintersmith inspired by the book of the same name. Then after you’re familiar with all that come and finish reading this post and then play the board games!

We’ve reviewed the games in publication order going from oldest to youngest and the last one will be the newest game we have looked at so far, having only been published in 2013.

Games for February: – Terry Pratchett

Monday the 3rd – Thud

Monday the 10th – Ankh-Morpork

Monday the 17th – Guards! Guards!

Monday the 24th – The Witches

Other Things to Note:

To my infinite disgust we now have a Twitter page. It took us a while, but we finally came to terms with the thought that it might be a good idea. Check it out HERE! Follow it etc.

The Twelve Games of Christmas – 2013 page is GONE! Having finally let go of the Christmas magic we took the stand alone page down. However the individual posts can still be found and brought together if you click on the category for them.

We have some very exciting ideas for future video blogs but are fundamentally stumped by our lack of a decent camera, but good ideas are in the works and will hopefully be a reality in a few months or less. SO, for now you’ll have to live with videos like the one we made of the game play of OSKA – which you can see HERE!

Along with Breach The Keep we have two other games in the works. One is a card game called Crush the Crown! Which we will be posting the rules for soon and hoping for (but not expecting) some feedback! There is another, far cooler, project in the works which will be posted about soon, so definitely look out for that.

This may be a premature announcement but we are having a website built to host internet versions of games we design starting with Breach The Keep. However, it’s in early stages, but is coming along nicely so expect it, but not for half a year or so.

And don’t forget to like us on facebook HERE!

Update – January 2014

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A Happy New Year to you all and I hope it’s been a good year so far! This is something we’re going to start doing monthly; an update post! … Everyone’s favorite type of post (heavy amounts of sarcasm implied upon that, in-case anyone didn’t get it). In these update posts we will tell you the four games we’re doing for the coming month and the dates they’ll go up, along with any other developments of interest, of which there will hopefully be a fair few in this coming year, so keep your eyes open because otherwise you may miss an opportunity to gain something awesome!

Additionally we will be theming the months, for example this month is Old (usually) Wooden Games. And with any luck the last post of each month (or the second to last post) will be accompanied by a video blog… But don’t hold me to that.

Games for January: – Old (usually) Wooden Games

Monday the 6th – Solitaire

Monday the 13th – Shove Ha’penny/Rebound

Monday the 20th – Oska

Monday the 27th – Go

Other Things to Note:

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve upgraded to our own domain name, we are now just www.tametheboardgame.com!

We’ve also started a facebook page so come give it a like HERE!

AND we’ve updated our About page so go check it out!

Also also! Banner change! We’ve changed our banner so the backdrop of it is some games we’re going to review this year, in the same way that last years one was all games we reviewed last year (excluding Thud, which is still in this banner backdrop as we will be reviewing it this year).

The Boards to Breach The Keep have finally arrived! So sometime this month a post about the ever developing-ness of that will go up and the progress that has been made is rather note worthy but I’ll leave all the to the actual post!