I tend to post quite a bit, which might be understating it a tad, and I certainly write a lot of session reports. My reviews have also been generally well received… but why aren’t there more of them?

There are two major reasons:

The first is this: I find a good review a lot of work. There’s analysis involved, a description of what the game involves, and then organising my opinions into some form of cohesive whole. I can easily take 2-4 hours working out a review, and that’s a lot of time for something.

Those who encountered my D&D reviews over at EN World may have noticed I tend towards the exhaustive. That’s not true of all of my reviews – my review of Carcassonne on boardgamegeek is a little perfunctory, and the one I’m least happy with – but I do want to include enough for someone to get a good idea of what’s going on with the product, boardgame or RPG book as it may be.

The other regards my familiarity with the product. I really, really want to have played the game or used the book first. That is a big problem for RPGs, because book usage is something that is measured in years, not days. One doesn’t go through playtesting all the monsters in the Monster Manual over a weekend! Really, for a lot of RPG products, I’m ready to review them a year or two later. That’s a bit too late for most people to get any benefit out of them. With RPG reviews, I tend to cheat on the playtesting, and I really hate that.

Board game reviews? Oh, boy. I can’t cheat those. I really, really need to play the game, and a number of times. 5-10 times would be what I’d like to play for the bigger games. I’ve played Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery once, so there’s no way I’m going to review it. I’ve written a session report which includes my impressions of the game – so it’s sort of a review – but I’m not going to put my name to something I call a review unless I’m sure I’ve got a handle on the game.

I’m playing more boardgames than ever at the moment, but this doesn’t involve playing the *same* boardgame over and over. And things get even more confused once you have a game like Memoir ’44, where each scenario has its own quirks and balance. I’ve played over a dozen games of Memoir ’44, but only once for each scenario! Have I really played it enough to review it fairly?

In M44’s case, yes, I probably have, but I’m not 100% sure of that.

There are a few boardgames that I’ve now played enough to review, so you’ll probably see a few of those over the coming months. I’d like to write more reviews, but we’ll see how my time is used.

One play reviews? Don’t even talk to me about them. Even if I really dislike a game after playing it once, I generally want to play it again. Especially if a lot of people like it. That’s how I am with Runebound. I dislike a lot of things about it, but that didn’t stop me buying it and playing it solo – where I think it works a lot better.