Hey hey BATT Family! We had an incredible opportunity to sit down with Jamey Stegmaier from Stonemaier Games to discuss the current tariff situation, how it effects his business and the larger gaming industry as a whole, and some of the solutions he thinks could make the situation easier for everybody. We had a little bit over a half hour of his ti…

Hey hey BATT Family! Welcome back to another main episode of the pod. This week, since we're on a five, we've got a guest with us as we do our Top Ten Games that We Enjoy Teaching! It's a bit of an askew topic to go with, but it was selected by our guest (Erik!) and it was a fun list to go through. This did end up taking two passes to fully record …

Hey hey BATT Family! Today we are going to be reviewing Belgian Beers Race Dice which was provided to us by Grand Gamers Guild. This is roll and write game for 1-4 players and takes approximately 30-45 minutes to play. We hope you enjoy the review! Feel free to hit us up on any of our regular contact methods to let us know what your opinions are on…

Hey hey BATT Family! Today we are going to be reviewing Inferno which was provided to us by Grand Gamers Guild. This is heavy, economic Euro game for 1-4 players and takes approximately 1 hour per player to play. As a pre-emptive note: we do start the discussion by mentioning the extremely heavy theme and how you're not representing good people (at…

Hey hey BATT Family! Thanks for your patience while this one came out a bit late. Please see the note below. But we had MacWagCon 2025 happen and we wanted to talk through all the games! We got to play an enormous amount of stuff over three days of gaming and it was a great array to be able to discuss. In addition to all of those we take a very qui…

Hey hey BATT Family! Today we are going to be reviewing Ovation which was provided to us by Grand Gamers Guild. This is an action selection, resource management, set collection game for 1-4 players and takes approximately 30 minutes to play. We hope you enjoy the review and moreso enjoy the game! Feel free to hit us up on any of our regular contact…

Hey hey BATT Family! We hope you've taken the time to check out our Kickstarter preview content that we've gotten to release recently, we've been really enjoying playing everything to support some folks. Regardless, on this episode we talk game balance and why it matters, play a game that Mark hated in 2021 and unintentionally played again for this…

Hey hey BATT Family! We're back again today with another Kickstarter preview for you! Thanks so much again to Keun Games for supplying us with a copy of the Shadows: Heroes & Monsters as well as the parts to upgrade into second edition. Shadows is a game that presents itself as a PvPvE card game and it fulfills that promise as the targets on the fi…

BATT Family! We finally get to spill all of our thoughts out on the newest obsession here in the studio. Scales of Fate is the newest game from IV Studio and a new two-player only game set in the world of Veiled Fate. If you've been listening to BATT, you know that Veiled Fate is Mark's number one game so the chance to get in on this preview was hu…

Hey hey BATT Family! We're back with our next main episode! We hope you really enjoyed the Live! episode from PopiCon, we had a blast recording that one. Last week didn't have an off-week release unintentionally between returning from vacation, an absolute nightmare of a week at work, and preparing for MacWagCon (the studio honestly has probably ne…

Hey BATT Family! We recorded this episode LIVE!!! at PopiCon 2025 on January 31. We're presenting it to you here largely unedited to just give you that live experience (and also have you see all the stuff that normally gets edited out!). We had a blast with this one and we're looking forward to our next time we get to do this. --- You can email us …

Hey hey BATT Family! This week's episode is another episode of our This or That (or (in this case) the Other Thing) as we run down the three games of Stonemaier's Span series. We've been deliberating on two of the games for quite some time and now that we have Finspan in hand and have gotten to play it quite a bit, we felt it was finally time to br…

We're back! Episode 16 is a really fun conversation with Mark and Scott getting to talk about a surprising amount of ways to end games, geeking out entirely over a game that hasn't even hit crowdfunding yet, and starting in on series of games and the way they get out of hand sometimes. We hope you have a great time with this one - they were both fo…

Welcome to another review from the BATT team. Eila and Something Shiny is a narrative adventure scenario/campaign game designed by Jeffery CCH and published by NorthStar Games (though it's original printing was from ICE Makes). It was acquired as a Christmas gift and so this is not sponsored by the publisher. It should be noted that the entirety of…

So there was a flood. Things were lost and that's never any fun. We ended up losing the original episode 15 and so what should have been Episode 16 has now taken it's place. We recorded as Jason's place to test through all of our equipment and just to make sure we had some extra content recorded since we went through our backlog during the holiday …

Happy 2025 everybody! Sorry for lying to you with yesterday's Odds & Ends episode saying that we were done until Episode 15 released. Whoops. Guess we just had more content in the can for you. We really are going to be done until Episode 15 releases on January 14th though. --- Scott and Mark discuss their revised Top Ten of All Time lists in this e…

It's the end of the year BATT Family! That means that we're going to be going dark until Episode 15 releases on January 14th to just give us a little bit of breathing room to catch up after the holidays. We always have all this extra content lying around for these Odds & Ends episodes and we hope that you enjoy this one. I also really hope that you…

Merry Christmas Eve for those of you that celebrate and a happy Tuesday to everybody regardless. Scott is back doing some off week content with another installation of The Games That Made Us. HeroQuest was one of the most expensive games that Scott ever owned, constantly begging family members to purchase expansions for the game. And taking time ou…

Welcome back BATT Family! This week we have a wide ranging conversation about games that we both unintentionally brought to the conversation that had us making a surprising amount of weird noises to. We talk publishers that we love, publishers that don't work us, and games from a publisher we love that didn't work for us. Thanks so much for waiting…

Welcome back to the off-week BATT content! This week's episode is a return to our series of The Games That Made Us. This episode is about The Omega Virus and how it impacted Mark as a child, what influences it had on his love of themes and gaming, and just generally celebrating how far ahead of the rest of the industry it was at the time of it's re…

Man alive, this one we got weird with. Partially it's because we recorded so late, but we have a wide ranging and in depth set of conversations on neglected games, returning to older designs, and some real surprises had within. There are a number of moments that we caught each other by surprise and if you like hearing us disagree, then definitely t…

Happy Thanksgiving Week BATT Family! We hope that you'll be able to find a bit of relaxation this weekend (at least until Rivalry Week kicks off on Saturday). In the spirit of trying to bring people to the table and give you an alternate to playing Rummikub for the nine billionth time, we're giving you a variety of recommendations for games to brin…

This week's episode feels like we were just focused on talking about production quality and storage (considering that Freedom Five delivered yesterday, that can only be kismet for how rough that game's storage is). But we had a lot of fun talking about games that we've come to love, how a great game can transcend a bad teach, and how not every game…

Ahh, it's nice to be back to a regular episode again. We have an esoteric topic of the week, talk about all the games that we played recently, take a nostalgic dive back into some games that you may not have thought of in some time, and just gush over an area control game that Scott actually really likes. --- This episode's segments: 00:00:00 - Int…

BATT Family! It's been a busy month of super cool Kickstarters coming out and we ALSO got a pretty sick delivery from our friends at IV Studios. We give Tend the full preview/review treatment to help support their campaign that is currently running. Check out the episode and then go ahead and back the campaign! Links are below! 00:00:00 - Intro 00:…

Hey hey BATT Family! Today we are doing another separate review in support of our friends at Grand Gamers Guild and their new Holiday Hijinks Kickstarter campaign. The Holiday Hijinks themselves are 18 card micro games that are all escape rooms in a box. We talk about the highs and lows of them and wanted to make you aware of them! 00:00:00 - The H…

Welcome BATT Family to Episode 10 - The Top Ten Thematic Games! This is an odd episode for us at this point, because this was actually recorded fairly early into the production run but we needed to get Jake in to be able to record. So this one actually happened before we upgraded our equipment and had enough mics to support a guest appropriately. T…

Hey Madcala backers! Thanks so much for joining us for this little bonus episode for the Kickstart campaign. We hope to have you join us for the rest of our content as well. As a reminder, Madcala's campaign will be running from October 22nd to November 8th. Check it out! If you're in the future, then check it out anyway to do a late pledge. If you…

Welcome to the off week odds and ends episode! A variety of topics are being put out today, mostly extra conversation from Episode 9 with James Hudson. In addition to those topics, we've add in our conversation post-GenCon about Madcala and I really hope you enjoy that as much as we did. Finally there will be a small little nugget about Coma Ward -…

It's the best time of the year: Spooky Season! And darn it if Mark and Scott didn't forget to record a segment on this for release in an October episode. The joy of not considering release dates during pre-production. That'll be changing in the future, but until then have a whole singular helping of the topic. Enjoy! 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:36 - Hon…

This week's episode is one that Mark and Scott had an absolute blast recording and are still pumped that it happened. We have the inimitable James Hudson from Druid City Games on with this today and we got to talk a wide array of things with him. In addition to discussing gaming from an industry perspective, he also gave us a number of heads up on …

Mark and Scott take on two games of the Flatout Trilogy, Calico and Cascadia, and break down the way the games work, why they like the one they do, and what they don't enjoy in the other. At the end of the episode, they also give a recommendation to explore similar games. This episode's segments: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:55 - Calico vs. Cascadia 00:1…

This episode's segments: 00:00:00 - Intro / How Our Reviews Work 00:03:31 - Review: Intent to Kill 00:23:17 - Review: Neon 00:39:51 - Outro Thank you so much to Hobby World for providing us the copies of these games to review. This was not a paid review, however, the games were provided to us for free to review. If you would like us to review somet…

Another themed episode, this week we discuss solo modes and all the associated fun around that. We had a lot to say on it - really an enormous amount as it turned out - so one of the segments is being cut out and will be released as off-week content next Tuesday so we can keep to our general episode length. Hope you enjoy the conversation and if yo…

The cursed episode finally releases! We had to take three swings at recording this one between tornadoes, corrupted audio, and just finding the time to get it all put together. This is one of our favourite episodes we've done so far though. Not only do we have a wide ranging and thoughtful discussion on expansions, but we managed to talk about more…

Surprise! It's an extra little piece of bonus content for your Friday. Roleplaying provides insanely fun stories, some of which become that legendary status among groups. This is a way for us to tell those stories and prompt you to let us know what yours are! These won't be regular but they will always be a surprise! You can email us at boardallthe…

Scott's back with their next installment of "The Games That Made Us". They are already breaking the rules as they talk about the classic tabletop role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. This is dedicated to Staff Sgt. Marvin Lee Trost, who passed away on December 5th, 2004 when an I.E.D. detonated near his Humvee. "Thank you Marvin, for always seeing…

While we're adjusting to the editing process of multi-track recording, here's a random assortment of extra stuff that we've recorded and not released yet. We hope you enjoy the bloopers as much as we did, because parts of it we still totally lose it over. There is one blooper where Mark swears - other than that the episode is clean but we figured w…

This was some of the most fun we've had in an episode so far. We cover a wide range of games that we love (and one that Scott mostly can't stand) and focus on the idea of what's the best player count for any particular game. We got slightly rambly but in the process manage to sort of sneak in a bonus set of Table Shelf Trade reviews at the top! We …

On our off weeks, we still try and get you all the content your heart desires. So this time around, Mark talks about the 5 Games To Transition a Game Night with. Games that are used to start or end an evening or, more likely, to throw on the table while someone has to go be a responsible adult for a few minutes. He's talking all filler games and at…

It's an episode on the fives, meaning it's time for a Top Ten episode! That means we eject most of the regular segments and just have a fun time talking about a specific topic with a guest the whole time. This week's episode is the Top Ten Games to Start a Collection With! We had Jason on with us, ironically this was before any of the GenCon episod…

While we recover from GenCon and adjust to our new bi-weekly schedule, here is another episode of The Games That Made Us, from Mark this time, about Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia. We'll see you here next week for episode 5 - the Top Ten Games to Start a Collection With!By TheaterGeeks / Decision Space Gaming

Hey hey BATT Family! With the advent of GenCon upon us, and getting out those extra preview episodes last week, this week's episode drop is the first from Scott of The Games That Made Us. In addition, there is a small notice at the start of the episode regarding our release schedule. In case you skip past that to go straight into the content - life…

In Part Two of our 2024 GenCon preview coverage, we go through an amazing amount of games that we are looking forward to demoing and picking up. We had a lot of fun recording this, but there are a few episode notes to mention as we lost some of our segments to recording corruption: 1) As a correction, Nexus Ops' first edition was 2005 but the secon…

Part One of our GenCon preview coverage, this more rambling and less structured than normal conversation with fellow Theater Geek Jason was recorded on July 3, 2024. In this half of the conversation, we're discussing what we do when we show up in Indy, the food we all like to eat (hiiii-yah!), and the non-gaming events that are fun to attend. In Pa…

This week, we head straight into the discussion and continue on to our longest episode yet. Our regular episodes will always try and be in that 45-60 minute range and we just barely tipped over this time. But we had a great time talking about old favourites, new reinterpretations, games that caught us entirely by surprise, and even accidentally kin…

We're settling in and we're back to talk more board games. This week we each brought more games to talk about than the previous episodes, we torture Scott with an abstract area control game, introduce a new rotating segment, and have a guest baby at the end. We also have deployed a new intro and outro, please give us feedback on what you think! Thi…

We're back and we have a wide array of games that we discuss this time around. We talk about friends that we've met in the industry, games we are excited for, and memorialize a lost designer. This episode's segments: 0:00 - Intro 0:37 - What's Been on the Table 7:38 - Topic of the Week: Do You Have a Rating System? 22:04 - Why Did I Play That? 29:3…

Our first main episode! We're stoked to get it launched and have you listen to it. This episode's segments: 0:00 - Intro 1:00 - What's Been on the Table 6:00 - Topic of the Week: Collection Management 11:35 - Why Did I Play That? 20:45 - Table, Shelf, or Trade 40:03 - The Archives 50:03 - OutroBy TheaterGeeks / Decision Space Gaming

We decided to launch, and release our main episodes, on Tuesdays. So in the spirit of still providing content when we promised it. here's the first of a series that Scott and I will be embarking on. We're going to have discussions about the games that helped form us both as gamers and as people. This one was particularly close to my heart and so I …