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Nice episode! I just found this podcast and I like it!

Top 5 Villains in no real order... 1. Nurse Ratchet - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 2. Joker - Batman 3. Xenomorph - Alien/Aliens 4. Nucky Thompson - Boardwalk Empire 5. Daniel Plainview - There Will be Blood

Oft overlooked complex rules strategy: play the game. Stop the game when the thing might occur. explain the rule+rammifications. Let the player make their own strategic choice with the information. Using Catan as an example... No need to explain the robber until - a 7 is rolled, or someone has (or could possibly get to ) more than 7 cards. Typically, happens once play has gone around the table once. Noone is at risk in their first turn. So, it doesn't need to be known.

I know this is heresy, but I think there are plenty of fantasy games (gasp) and still not enough natural themes (gasp again) - not just animals and plants and mushrooms, but give me geology, plate tectonics, weather cycles, asteroids and such! Also, this is so cool that you got Andrew Bosley on, thanks for doing a great interview with him!

Kiri-Ai sounds really cool! It's amazing what people can do with just a few components.

Really enjoying this podcast, but I don't like Animal Crossing 😜I'm old school. I only like games that have defined levels/goals.

An aspect of Kiri-ai that nobody mentions is the rules on the advanced battlefield side of the card. Notice how in the standard game, the battlefield has triangles pointing towards the starting position of the samurai. On the advanced side, they're trapezoids pointing to three different spots because the players get to choose which of those three spots that their samurai starts out on. While the standard game has each side start out in the Heaven Stance, the advanced side allows each player to choose which stance to start out in. So the advanced version has more variable setup possibilities. In the Japanese rulebook, the five diamond symbols on the battlefield card were referred to as "Maai" which is a term used in Japanese martial arts that refers to the engagement distance/timing between two combatants. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maai In the Japanese rulebook, there's also an alternate victory condition for the advanced battlefield. "If your samurai card pushes the opponent's card to the very edge, and your samurai has not been cut, the player who pushed the opponent wins." My headcanon is that since the two samurai are fighting on a cliff, this alternate victory condition is that you push your opponent off the cliff. This is also why you see your color on the opposite side of the card in the advanced battlefield. But no one seems to talk about any of these aspects. I'm not a fan that the rules for the advanced side aren't included in the rulebook. Instead, they just directed those rules to a webpage: mugengaming.com/pages/rules-and-instructions I suspect this is why every reviewer of this game makes zero mention the things I just said.

Mech v minions is amazing. My wow game would probably be Merchants of the Dark Road and My Father’s Work.

I also love the mnstr logo btw! So simple and efficient!

I hear you about long rulebooks... but Voidburners, my current (finished) prototype, will have around 25-30 plus a glossary. I have yet to make a nice layout, it's still in Word format. But there are plenty of imagines, examples, etc. XD