Hey! It’s the 50th entry! (confetti)
This topic is specifically targeted at publishers, reviewers, and otherwise influencers. Who do you find the most reliable, given their own style of exposition and alignment with your personal preferences?
Who, on the other hand, has superbly contrary (relative to your own) taste or presentation you can’t sit through?
Tbh, probably you
Opinions on games
Yeah, people here as I’m tuned to all your tastes through the last game played thread
Spacebiff, qwertymartin’s BGG comments and Board Gems (Darryl Boone).
Publishers
CGE and Rio Grande generally are in my sweet point of price to quality ratio and keeping them available
Designers
Knizia, Kramer, Kiesling, Dorra, Friese gets a mention for doing interesting stuff
Bwahahaa!
Go buy a copy of Splendor and burn it. So say I.
I know modern parlance, but I keep on looking at my own title and thinking whom. Whom do you trust, dude.
Trust is maybe too big a word.
Mostly, I don‘t feel that my tastes align with anyone enough that I would blindly follow their recommendations. Also my taste keeps changing, maybe it is evolving, maybe I am just erratic?
Looking at my top rated games I find the sources who may have recommended them to be:
Of all the reviewers my tastes probably align the most with Zee Garcia (except when they don’t) and I‘ve got a bunch of really great games from his reviews.
I also tend to check in with what Spacebiff, Tom Vasel, SVWAG and Radho are reviewing when time allows. I regularly check my Buddy Analysis mostly to prevent me from buying games—I put all the interesting reviewers as my buddys as well and a bunch of people I searched for who seem to be either playing and reviewing a lot or seem to like similar games as I do.
I stopped listening to BG media and focus on what I got. But if I do listen: The best one would be to look at the Dads on a Map podcast and check the community Top 20 every year. Anything new there will immediately go to my wishlist.
But most of the time, I check whats up by myself. I made my own list for SPIEL by checking things out in BGG.I look at what’s new in Cube Rails genre (I stopped with 18xx as I don’t play them offline), if Splotter is releasing a new game after a few years since the last one, or Carl Chudyk’s card games. Knizia and Cole Werhle are now low enough in the ranking for me to just blindly buy their games.
And if I see a game I fancy, I check my Geekbuddies.
I back Allplay and Bitewing kickstarters (but not every campaign) as they offer small box games. I can safely back their games without worrying about shelf space.
I seem to be in an Uwe Era right now so Im keen to try out any agrarian-theme games he makes (when are we getting the Swedes or the Danes expansion for AFFO? 
).
My first step when I hear about a new game that sounds interesting is to check BGG to see if it plays well at 2 (not perfect, but vastly more hits than misses) and if there’s text so I know if I need to wait for a French version or if I can settle for the usually cheaper English.
Once I have that, I check what the discourse is here (assuming this place isn’t how I heard about the game in the first place). I also ask a good friend of mine who sadly lives all the way in New Brunswick if he’s heard of the game in question and if so, what he’s heard. His tastes tend to align with ours (again, not perfect).
Then it’s review time. SU&SD and NPI are the usual suspects, with The Dice Tower occasionally, and if Watch It Played have released a tutorial I’ll peruse that to get a better idea of the mechanics. Rodney Smith is a national treasure.
About publishers, I have no idea. I got games from many and varied publishers and they tend to be quality overall. I think Iello and Matagot are my most represented, but I wouldn’t bet heavy on it. Even designers I barely pay attention to. I think my most represented is James Wilson, but that’s down to Everdell being awesome and me having nearly everything. One of these days I’ll sit down and make a list.
Basically, I guess I could say that great games can come from anyone and any house, but I’ll check with some folks if they sound worthwhile.
Splotter, Wehrlegig, lalunaverde… that’s about it for good sources that I use. I suppose I read spacebiff sometimes too, but not to the extent that it influences my interests.
Unaligned/unreliable? Just about every reviewer/influencer/shill out there. A few stick out as being particularly bad for me, but I don’t feel like naming and shaming.
I found people with opposite taste to be useful for my needs. Rahdo seems like the contrary taste, but the issue is that 1.) He likes everything. That’s not useful. 2.) This is not his fault: he is NOT a reviewer. idk why his fans insist on making him one and so he end up putting “final thoughts” section in his playthrough videos.
Instead of watching his videos, I can check his ratings page on BGG.
I still don’t know Ava’s taste that well so I can’t say how much we align. I would love to see their BGG rating page, if they have one. I seem to share some taste with Tom Brewster (but not enough to rigorously follow him) This is more of a “Developed World problem” but often times, our club(s) and I are in a metaphorical race against big names like SUSD, rather than waiting and seeing if the game is for us. I’m still glad that I received my order of Turncoats from Simonsson the very day SUSD released a video of it! My order took months to complete.
“wait Z is already sold out on shops?”
“Yeah. SUSD just released a video”
“oh shoot”
As for Geekbuddies: I have checked up JoshuaStarr’s rating page (yes. The owner of Grand Trunk Games) to see what games he rated recently. clearclaw’s page is outdated and somewhat inactive but still a good source of games to check if you’re looking at old forgotten games.
I tend to prefer his monthly roundup where he ranks all the games he played in a month. And suddenly he doesn’t like ALL games anymore. It’s just his thing for the run-throughs to be super-positive. I mean a lot of those are previews for Kickstarters that appear on the KS pages of said Kickstarters. They have to be.
The monthly roundup is much more interesting.
His focus on not-too-aggressive two player should be right up my alley.
And sometimes it is.
Other than the misleading positivity, I think his runthroughs are pretty good if a bit too verbose but seeing how many words I usually need both in spoken and written word to explain something, who am I to complain about that 
I didn’t know those exists. Thanks!
He actually sometimes disses a game in those. That’s how I didn’t buy Rock Hard 1977.
PS: I barely watch any youtube content these days. I watch one of those roundups every 3 months maybe?
I vastly prefer written content, it’s easier for me to parse, I can go back easier and it takes thought to write something.
Video, you can point shoot and ramble
Oh, most definitely this.
I remember Rahdo didn’t like the attack cards in Res Arcana, but, being unscripted, he rambled for about 5 minutes about the elven bow. Then he and Lehmann got pissy at each other on the bgg forums for about a week.
I’ve found Rahdi very helpful. He has contrary taste, but his playthroughs and ability to narrate his every thought give a really good sense of the game when reviews and other things do not.
I liked Thinker-Themer when they were just getting started, but they went off into a more Euro direction than I really like, and now they’re one of those names I keep seeing on kickstarters, the way UndeadViking was a few years ago.
I don’t think there’s any reviewer whose tastes align entirely with mine, but I think a good reviewer will give me enough information about why they like or dislike something that I can work out whether to investigate further anyway. I think there’s an assumption that more experienced boardgamers will go more and more into the complex Euro direction—and I know some of you lot do, I’m not saying you’re wrong—but my taste is more for the lower complexity and thematic integration.
Incidentally, don’t bother with Sarah Shapp’s Thematic Integration in Board Game Design—it’s written in desperately pseudo-academic obfuscatory language, and it’s stupidly overpriced for what’s basically recycled blog posts, even though the actual ideas are solid.
At a high level, I do not trust publishers and designers. We are, generically speaking, enemies because we are playing a game and are at odds with each other. They want me to buy their games regardless of their merits. I want to enjoy their games, but my budgets are limited; my “space budget”, my “time budget,” and my “actual cashflow budget”.
I trust very few reviewers; particularly those that regularly receive free games. Even if they are honest with their reviews, they are still living in a bubble where the value of games becomes disjointed. If you received it for free and “enjoyed it”, what does that mean for someone who would have to pay $85?
If I had to choose a publisher I trust the most, it would be Kayenta Games, which is basically just Dan Halligan- purveyor of the fine Obsession and its expansions. He’s very engaged with the BGG community, maintains a high-degree of transparency, and is genuinely kind and helpful.
If I had to choose a designer, it might be Cole Wehrle, who loves game design as much or possibly more than game sales. It’s not uncommon for his games to be available as print-and-play with open playtesting available during crowdfunding periods. Some of this extends to Leder Games and Cole’s own publishing company, Wehrlegig. I think Leder Games gets some extra credit here as well as part of this “open” way of integrating the community into their games and development processes, even for games that do not involve Cole.
With boardgame video content media these days, I basically only watch playthrough videos so I can get a feel of how a game flows and the decisions involved.
I’m starting to enjoy written content more, but generally just things written by users (here and BGG forums, primarily) and not reviewers.
I considered naming both Dan Halligan and Cole Wehrle in my post above. Then decided to go the route of checking the top of my list instead.
As most here, there is not really one reviewer I trust. SU&SD is usually really good at presenting a game and showing both the good and the bad, and there are a number of games which fell short of a recommendation but I knew it would be a good fit for me, and then games they raved about which I knew would utterly fall flat for me.
NPI does pretty good in this area as well.
I have watched Rahdo from time to time, which can give you a good idea of how a game plays (and is the reason I wanted Ghost Stories way back when), but I haven’t seen any of his content for a few years now, as his presentation was rather haphazard, speaking a stream of consciousness as he played, often with some mistakes, which to his credit he usually annotated corrections. Also, he’d be very positive about just about every game (that I watched, anyway), and then his final thoughts on it would just be based on how well it played at two player for him and his wife.
Rodney Smith’s “Watch it Played” can be really good, though I have only watched a few videos.
I’ve watched a number of Dice Tower videos, but never really feel like I make any decisions based on their reviews, and mostly used to enjoy their various lists just to see what made a splash for them any given year.
I can’t say there’s any publishers that automatically get my money.