Ep 10 – What’s Your worst?

by Mitch | Mar 15, 2020 | Everyday Meeple, podcast

In Episode 10 we spend a lot of time chatting about some of our favourites games. I’m looking at you Raiders of the North Sea. I introduce Steve to geekgroup.app a web app that links to your BGG (Board Game Geek) account and visualizes your collection data in so many fun ways. This leads us to discover what is considered the worst games in our collections based on the BGG ranking system. Of course, being the lowest-ranked may not actually make them the worst.

What’s your lowest ranked game?

Corrections

Please click for a quick note on Pachisi
Shem Phillips is the sole designer of Raiders of the North Sea. Steve may have said that he designed the game with S J Macdonald but that is not the case. The two are co-designers of the “ West Kingdom” trilogy of games including Architects, Paladins and Viscounts of the West Kingdom. The two are not brothers although it would appear that Sam Phillips, the artist behind Circadians: First Light and Raiders of Scythia is the brother of Shem. They all live in New Zealand.
Inka and Markus Brand are indeed a dream team design team and a married couple. And, while we mentioned a couple of their games that we’re interested in playing, we failed to mention that they are the designers of Rise of Queensdale, a game that we’ve been interested in playing since having first heard about it.

*If you notice anything else please let us know in the comments or send us an email.

A note on Pachisi (Parcheesi)

Not really a correction, but to be clear Pachisi in any of it’s forms is not a reimplementation of Backgammon, but it feels like it to me. And just to be clearer, Pachisi is old, not chess old, but really old. It dates back to about 400 AD. It is also the National Game of India. The version we know in North America – including all of its variations (Sorry, Aggrevation, Ludo etc) is slightly different than the original. and some of the differences are telling if not important. The original is designed for team play while the commercialized version is designed for individuals. The starting positions and the track vary somewhat as well. The original (Pachisi) uses cowry shells, sort of a D2 system to dictate movement while the modern commercial version uses two dice. This cowry shell system is actually where the name sort of comes from. With the original system the highest “roll” scores a 25 which is called “pachis” BGG has these two games as one entry since they are so closely linked but they seem different enough to have there own entries since one is historical and one is a derivitave. Monopoly and Monopoly: Simpsons are listed as distinct games why not Pachisi and Parcheesi?