Rest and Recovery

As predicted last month, my broken wrist recovery has meant I’ve had all of September off work as well as most of August. Thankfully, things are looking better, healing well, and the days are going a lot quicker, so I’m hopeful of returning to work (and finally earning money again!) in the next few weeks. What this means for the TSM Blog I’m not entirely sure — it’s pretty hit-and-miss as things stand anyway, so I don’t see that changing much in the foreseeable.

September proved to be not only a month of recovery from injury, but a ‘soft’ month for boardgaming, too — other than another visit to Beyond Monopoly! in York earlier in the month, my gaming exploits have been limited primarily to solo play and a couple of days at the hospital with my eldest daughter (where we did get to play Brushwood, Tulip Season and Blancat at least!)

Recreational Recess

That said, I did also get treated to a day out in Knavesmire, and just returned from a weekend away in Longleat – being driven around instead of doing all the driving is certainly something I could get used to, but alas I fear that’ll be coming to an end in the next few weeks or so as my recovery continues!

Originally planned as a bit of a treat for my daughter (the hope being that her treatment would have ended by then), we stuck with our original plans for a Longleat weekend break — despite my own wrist injury and her treatment having to be extended for a bit longer than originally anticipated. Thankfully, everything went well, with no emergency hospital visits required over the weekend, and not only did we get the opportunity to go to The Farmer’s Dog (as seen on the Clarkson’s Farm TV series) on the way down —which was excellent, incidentally— but we also spent a whole day at Longleat Safari Park on the Sunday, and took the opportunity to take the safari bus in the morning — a busman’s holiday, for sure, but it was nonetheless an excellent day all round. I got plenty of photos, at least (see below), and can heartily recommend it as a great place to visit, especially for families.

Popular Negativity?

One side effect of me being stuck at home for recovery has been that I’ve had the chance to read and view a lot more things than usual on t’internet, and a lot of that has been quite negative: ‘boardgames are just a business now’, ‘prices are extortionate’, ‘there’s no originality’, ‘too many trick-takers’, and ‘variations on a theme done to death’ are just some of the stuff I’ve been hearing. Annoyingly, I kind of agree with much of this, but I’m also still seeing sparks of originality and stuff that continues to surprise me…

I may write more about this another time, but I do wonder if there’s any stock or ‘mileage’ in talking about some of the not-so-good stuff and ‘exposing’ them? As you can probably guess, we do get to see quite a few games (not as much as many other channels, mind you), but we’re also quite selective about the ones we like to see: we don’t usually cover prototypes or early production copies, for instance, or certain niche products that have limited appeal, etc.

That said, we still have many games sitting on the shelf unplayed several months after arrival, in large part due to the difficulty of getting them to the table. Reasons include mechanics that don’t appeal, themes and topics that don’t resonate, games that just don’t attract any interest in our play groups, and the odd title where a first play has proved uninspiring at best. The obvious question is “would anyone really be interested in reading about these titles, or are they already tombstoned, so to speak?”

I should probably add a caveat here because there are many more boardgames (and card games, of course) that are of immediate interest, do instantly appeal and do make it to the table much easier — these tend to be the ones that I write about because most of the time they’ve proven to be largely pleasant and positive experiences.

Conventions, etc…

Unfortunately, I still haven’t had the opportunity to make it to any of the Tabletop Scotland conventions, the most recent of which took place earlier this month in Edinburgh (4th-6th September) — I gather this went well by all accounts. There is another major convention coming soon that’s a bit more local to me, and that’s the Tyneside Games Expo — this takes place on the 17th-18th October at the Gateshead International Stadium (in Gateshead of course), and at time of writing I’m a doubtful, but you never know…

I do potentially have a very busy October ahead, and as the deadline for the next issue of Tabletop SPIRIT looms ever closer, things will probably get a bit crazy busy here, but I’m very pleased with what we already have planned, so fingers crossed it should hopefully be another bumper Christmas issue for all and sundry, and I may even share more details about that next month… 🤞

— Alex Bardy, 30Sept26