Review Drift and optimising for first play

That’s definitely one of my influences for MGTT too: the closest I’ve got to New Hotness was talking about V-Commandos while the recent expansion KS was still going, but that was from the perspective of having been playing it for 30-odd games over a few years rather than just having been sent a review copy and having to scramble to get something out in a timely way.

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I think there may be a common enough arc that might apply to more hobbies than boardgames.

  • First you try the thing occasionally.
  • Something triggers a desire to do more research to improve your experience with the thing
  • Research leads to reviews
  • You start spending more time and money based on the reviews
  • You discover that the reviews aren’t enough to go by
  • You look at more reviews and compare them…
  • You know enough to question the reviews and do other research so you don’t have to rely on reviewers who don’t match your tastes
  • You stop watching reviews altogether because you know enough about the thing to gauge if a thing is for you on your own.
  • You accidentally watch a review, disagree vehemently and become a reviewer yourself or you make a post on BGG that you are sick of it all and quit. Then you get into a new hobby.

Kind of like that :wink:

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Somewhere in there, you start learning about things from announcement lists rather than reviews. :slight_smile:

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My issue with SVWAG reviews is that they’re so granular in their analysis.

While they are against the ‘this game is broken’ culture, often their dislikes will come down to focusing a sizeable portion of their review upon a single mechanic, to the point of bordering on a ‘broken’ mentality. They start with a broad (and entirely valid) point and then simmer it down in conversation until they’re making ridiculous reductive statements, whilst also spending a lot of time cracking jokes about how boardgamers are overly reductive (and un-self aware… but that’s a different issue for a different time).

Generally, I find their reviews useful when they like a game (where they do cover lots of different aspects that help me decide if I’ll like the game or not), but utterly pointless when they dislike a game because of how laser focused they are on the aspect they don’t enjoy. When they dislike a game, it often sounds like there is no game at all, because X Y and Z either make a game entirely random or predetermine the winner from turn 1 (not every time, but it’s certainly a recurring theme). Either way, it’s framed as the game’s mechanical design making competition redundant, rather than deciding the game is not for them.

I listen to them every now and again when it’s a heavier game I’m interested in, since they have more to say than purely how long/heavy the game is (when will reviewers get over this issue???), but I end up getting so frustrated! I don’t know why I do it to myself :sweat_smile:

What I need is the passion and sense of fun of SUSD with the analytical tools for heavier games of SVWAG. NPI were that for me (their Feast for Odin and Lacerda reviews for example were great), but they’re branching into new territories now. They’ve even delisted a lot of my fav reviews because they don’t want the less slick videos to be someone’s first impression of their channel. That’s fine for maintaining productionn values, but damn, that’s some of their best work!

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