The Argument Hour, with Seth and TC

I listen to a lot of game industry podcasts. 

Many of them are just people talking about games they like, or games they're looking forward to. There's never been a lot of design focused podcasts... a few have cropped up over the years, some better than others. I listen to the following pretty regularly that actually talk about the design of games:

Ludology
Board Game Design Lab
Building the Game
Game Designers of North Carolina

There are a few others as well, but I still always thought there was room for designers talking about the nitty-gritty of game design. I've always wanted to participate in something like that, but I didn't want to figure out how to do hosting and editing myself, and I would have wanted another voice to talk to (rather than just monologueing).

I mentioned something about this on social media a couple of months ago, and I got some interest from game designer, podcaster, and boardgame twitter personality, T.C. Petty III. Then Isaac Shalev of On Board Games contacted us, offering to edit and host such a podcast on On Board Games, should T.C. and I decide to record one.

And so was born The Argument Hour, with Seth and TC! 

The Argument Hour is a segment I've started doing with TC Petty III on the On Board Games podcast, where T.C. and I pick a topic related to board game design, and we basically argue about it for while. Then we do our twist on a game review. I don't like the idea of unilaterally saying whether a game is good or bad, so our reviews are more of a mechanical look at the game in question, and then our opinion on what kind of player that game would be good for.

Edit: after the first two episodes, we stopped doing reviews. We might reserve that for times where we have a game we really want to talk about, rather than try to do a review each time. It's been a while since we've done one of these, but I do hope to get back to it some time. In the meantime, the 4 existing episodes are pretty good, if I do say so myself!

Episode 1 dealt with the "Alpha Player Problem" (whether it even exists), and included a brief review of Kingdomino.

Episode 2 was all about honing/returning to the well/designers revisiting ideas. The review that time was The Voyages of Marco Polo.

Episode 3 was about the use of mechanics that rely on loss aversion in games, such as loans, and we mentioned a related (?) topic, scoring leftovers at the end of a game.

Episode 4 discussed games that put excess cognitive load on the players, spurred by this blog post by Jeff Warrender.

So if you read this blog, maybe you'd be interested in this. Give them a listen and enjoy! Leave a note here with comments and suggestions...