Board games is an industry. A community. Full of people.
Doesn’t have to be scandals, but what are some of the stories that have played out among the people that bear retelling? Humorous, inspiring, horrifying?
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Do boxes full of air count as a scandal? Because some of those are absolutely scandalous.
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As long as they don’t wear socks as well it’s fine.
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I provided the final straw that got a small publisher banned from a large UK-based board game group on Facebook…
He had put up a big lot of games for sale, taken money off people and then not sent them the games for reasons of being (allegedly) out of the country, but also not telling anyone or responding to any messages about the undelivered games. I obviously take longer to get fed up than other people, because by the time I messaged the mods about not being able to get in contact with the guy, they had already fielded a bunch of other complaints and been assured that everything was sorted. But it wasn’t sorted and thus: banned.
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Luckily, not much. We had a couple of weirdos in the club before. I wasnt present on the same table on those. There’s one that made some women uncomfortable - insta-ban!
The way that the club where I was an original was founded was because we got kicked out of a board game cafe!
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There’s the other one on that group at the minute as well.
A retailer not responding to messages as the email isn’t working (for over a year), doesn’t have staff in the warehouse (also for over a year). The owner ( and only person in the company) has had chronic health issues for over a year.
About once a month someone will post 'havr you heard from BoardGameGuru and the apologists and detractors will fight.
At some point you’re better winding down and liquidating.
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Ah, shame, they used to be quite good for a few things.
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In a wider scandal
There’s Knizia x Grail Games and Wallace x Bohrer
Yeah, I was thinking about things like Lunarchitects, Broken Token, Quackalope, Gatwick Games, Lehmann vs Rahdo…
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I’m afraid I only know about petty internet drama 
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Lone Shark Games definitely had a bit of scandal during their previous Kickstarter when they added two different inventory lists of Lords of Vegas, only to later learn they were the same inventory. Really hosed them over. Plus there’s a lot of complaints of terrible customer service from them on BGG over the years.
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In general, I like to hear about how these people in the industry are treating other people because I want to know who to support and who to avoid. But so often these things evolve into situations where nobody who wasn’t actually in a specific place at a specific time really knows what happened.
(intentionally side-stepping public scandals that have already played out and/or of which I have little to add)
Perhaps once again I’ll point a spotlight at Dan Hallagan, of Kayenta Games/Obsession fame, and mention a time I saw him catch someone posting his game+expansions for sale at a higher price than MSRP, exploiting the situation where the only place to buy it new was the Kayenta Games website that was not necessarily well-advertised.
I spent some time trying to find where I saw Dan talking about it. My Google-fu is somewhat weak these days as I can’t seem to find where it played out and, at this point, I don’t even recall if it was an eBay listing or BGG marketplace, etc, or where I saw him talking about it.
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I guess the production of Leaving Earth is a bit of drama
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Martin Wallace and Brass Deluxe
Gatwick Games (I enjoy the pettiness of this one, seems it’s a company that just repackages other peoples’ games but doesn’t really care)
Lehmann, Rahdo, and Res Arcana (and this one was so out of character for both of them…)
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I’m not going to link anything about Quackalope as it all took a long time to digest at the time and seemed foolish to me. Essentially, Quackalope did some internal coverage of a game, didn’t like it, but got some rules wrong. They asked for money to do additional coverage and get someone from the studio to come help them get everything right. The studio said no thanks, and Quackalope said ok, then we’ll just release the coverage we’ve already made.
The internet cried blackmail and oh my gosh they are asking for money from a game designer to create content! Quackalope somehow got crucified in the process.
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Latest big Scandal I’ve been paying attention to is Hans im Gluck trademarking the word meeple in some jurisdictions and threatening small publishers with legal action if they use it.
Everything else I’ve paid much attention to would violate the philosophy of no political discussions here.
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Now that youve mentioned it…
The TFM big box kickstarter got complaints about how EACH cube has its own plastic bag. Yes. Each Cube. The reason is to protect cubes - even from each other. It is wasteful and it is 100% fault of the publusher, but there is the utter entitlement of board gamers complaining over tiny scratches on components that perhaps nudged Frylexius Games towards this route.
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It totally was blackmail tho’.
“I have filmed this very negative review that is only incidentally related to your product because I got the rules all wrong. You can pay me to replace it with new content, and do my due diligence to make sure I get the rules right for me, or not. Your call, not my responsibility really.”
Or at least, that’s what I vaguely remember from the whole debacle.
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As others have said, we’ll never really know. I was bored at the time and found the actual text of the emails that passed back and forth, and remember being much less shocked after reading them than I was from the buzz.
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I also read the emails at the time. I think maybe you focused on intent (there was no intent to blackmail), while I focused on the lack of due diligence and the result (which I choose to call blackmail through a stunning lack of awareness).
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