Welcome to Of Dice and Meeples

Boardgames Of Dice and Meeples
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I am starting an APA about boardgaming: Of Dice and Meeples.

This is a form of slow discussion originating among hobby printers in the 1870s with a digital update: each month, or whenever you can, you send in your own contribution (as a PDF file), I merge them together, and everyone can read them as a single document. Contributions contain both your own material, and comments on other people’s contributions in earlier issues.

I’ve been participating in the role-playing apa Ever and Anon for more than half a year, and having written the necessary software I wanted to keep its principles but extend them to a new topic.

Everyone is welcome to contribute. There’s a guide at the web site but “write something interesting, output it as a PDF” is the core of it, and if you can’t make a PDF you can throw practically any sort of document at PanDoc and get it out in that format.

Deadline for issue #1 is 2026-05-05T23:00:00Z

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I am sure I can write something. Interesting is more of a question :sweat_smile: how many words is considered an average contribution?

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There is no precedent 'cos it’s new.

Looking at Ever & Anon, my own contributions have varied between 3 and 6 pages of my own stuff (what I’ve been playing lately, my thoughts on the Ignorable Theme which is an entirely optional writing prompt, usually something else RPG-related that I feel like writing about) and about as much more in comments to other people’s zines from the previous issue.

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Since I already contribute to Ever and Anon and my thoughts on boardgaming are not interesting, even to me, I doubt I’d contribute this. But I did notice a couple of oddities:

It is about boardgaming? The first paragraph on the website says:

Of Dice and Meeples is a digital monthly Amateur Press Association (APA) about roleplaying games and is published under the Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Assuming this is just a copy-and-paste error and the focus is on boardgaming, rather than setting a “Maximum length for fiction [of] 6 pages,” I suggest maybe forbidding fiction entirely. Fiction is more adjacent to roleplaying than boardgaming.

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Also, and I’m sure you just haven’t gotten around to it, you should announce this on the E&A Discord.

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I don’t Discord. You are welcome to pass on the message (and I’ll fix that text; Jim kindly gave me permission to use it).

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A reminder: less than a week to get your piece in for the first issue.

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Deadline for issue 2 is 2026-06-05T23:00:00Z.

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Thought I’d join to say a few things/preach about ODaM, and persuade some folks to cobble something together for a future issue so that we can all enjoy the slower, more unseen side of life, but truth be told I don’t know how best to go about it.

While I don’t know anyone here, I can imagine your collections contain just as many unique-to-you titles as they do crossovers with the majority. Some game nights are going to spent playing those common games you all know about, but I bet a lot of you enjoy the thrills of playing something new and different, and not just in the sense of very recently released, but new to your knowledge of the hobby.

In a recent issue, Roger talked about Rush n’ Crush, a game I’d never come across in person, in store, online, via video, top ten list, recommendations in a comment on a social media post that would functionally disappear in just as short a space of time as it took the poster to write in the first place… I’m not saying ODaM is the only place I would have found Rush n’ Crush, but in this day and age I think it’s fair to say I would only have come across it as a result of someone else having said words to the effect of “Have you tried this?” and then having enough time and space to justify why, as opposed to just dropping a title in a comment section and leaving me to it.

I have no idea what else I’m going to discover whenever a new issue is ready, because I’ve got no idea how anyone else will tackle a loose, ignorable theme and a broad word count. I don’t even know how I’m going to tackle it, until I look at the shelves and rediscover a title I’ve apparently glossed over for whatever reason. If I can’t get it to the table, I can at least bring my memories to the front of my mind, and hope that they can inspire or remind the reader in the same way I’ve been.

And I don’t have to rush about any of it. There’s a deadline, yes, but it’s a month away. I don’t have to get the first reply in to a Reddit thread, or compose it in a way that gets the most upvotes. I just have to be me, and waffle away on whatever I want to waffle about, safe in the knowledge that it’ll be another month before anyone replies - if they want to wait that long, of course.

It’s just neat. There we go, ODaM is just neat. Like receiving a letter in post it is old school, and in an instant, immmediate digital world, sometimes I just want the more personal long read instead.

The next theme is Alpha players and I don’t play a whole load of co-op games, so will I end up ignoring the theme? No idea - haven’t looked at my shelves yet. You’ll find out in a month, and hopefully I’ll find out what kind of games you’re eager to talk about too.

Right. Time to look around these forums.

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And I only know about it because @EnterTheWyvern of this parish showed it to me at an in-person gathering; I’ve similarly never seen or heard of it elsewhere.

But I only know Landmarks because I heard about it being launched at Essen 2024. I’ve never seen another copy.

There are lots and lots (and lots) of games out there. Some of them intersect with the sort of game I like, or might grow to like; most don’t. But the only ones I’m going to hear about from most media are the latest hottest with a good publicity budget. I absolutely rely on personal recommendations for the rest.

I’m running the APA because I like the slow pace of discussion in Ever & Anon and wanted to see if it could work elsewhere. It’s not what I want to do for all the discussion I have, but I like to have that alternative.

The technical bar to contributing is very low. Write something. Give it a title. If you feel like it, reply to things other people said in the previous issue. Send me a PDF, or if that’s a pain send me something else and I’ll PDF it.

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To continue the chain I only know about it through a happenstance.

For years I played Rackham’s Confrontation miniature game and it remains the favourite wargames I’ve ever played. They died and I started playing more boardgames.

After a hiatus and getting back in to board games I went to UKGE. In the bring and buy I got in to the area just as a volunteer moved someone’s games to the shelf to get placed out for sale. The sound and motion almost startled me and as I glanced down I saw the rackham logo. No research other than seeing it £5 I bought it to play with the 2 confrontation players from my group who I still played board games with. I just wanted to show them the rackham logo and slightly reminisce together and somewhat expected it to be one and done.

The fact I own it now and introduced it to @RogerBW something around 5 years after I purchased it should be testament enough of my enjoyment.

In retrospect my low expectation weren’t thought through. Rackham’s Confrontation had such wonderful rules and was so well developed that the game having a solid core of rules shouldn’t have been a surprise.

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And yet its genesis had nothing to do with Rackham. The original 2003 release (which appears to have been mostly a print and play) seems to have been without a setting; for the 2009 release Rackham tied it into their skirmish game setting, which honestly would have put me off if I’d seen the box on a shelf.

(Though I need to design and 3d-print some better car models. At the very least, ones that can be readily distinguished from each other.)

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hey, I have a copy and we’ve even brought it to the table a couple of times here :slight_smile:

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