The world of boardgaming is rapidly expanding. With that expansion comes all sorts of ‘adjacent’ stuff, things like reviews, instructional videos, and merchandise. There is also a fabulous and highly entertaining world of boardgame related media being created by lots of talented people across the world. These include skits, comics, parodies, memes and everything in between, all filled to the brim with boardgaming references and in-jokes. Today I’m going to talk about some of my favourite boardgame related things, and link you through so you can check them all out yourself!
Board With Life
Board With Life is a web based video series produced by Moonrat Media, hosted on Youtube. There are two seasons of ‘Board with Life’, their main show. Each episode of the show features a certain game and depicts the BWL group playing the game and having to deal with an issue that is typically inspired or loosely related to the game’s theme. The show features many entertaining moments but also deals with more ‘real’ issues and feels like a very well rounded show with great production value.
The channel also features a bunch of other content, including several ‘Bits’ (short skits), game playthroughs, and they used to run a news show too. My favourite Bit would have to be the Mr Jack Bit. There is a handy playlist for Season 1 of Board With Life, and you can find so much more stuff on their main channel page.
Take Your Chits
Take Your Chits is a comedic Youtube channel run by Seattleite Christian Kang. Christian creates all sorts of light hearted and fun boardgaming related videos, including discussions of meta-boardgaming topics, skits, and even some serious discussions. Christian is a master of comedic timing (or maybe jump cuts) and all of his videos are engaging and amazingly produced.
My favourites from Take Your Chits include 6 hacks to keep your boardgames in great condition, and Chit hobby board gamers play. Make sure to subscribe to Take Your Chits on Youtube to follow along, and Christian also runs a hilarious Twitter account.
Tiny Wooden Pieces
Tiny Wooden Pieces is an (unfortunately now defunct) webcomic that was produced by Colin O’Mahoney and Aileen Cudmore from 2014 to 2017. There are hundreds of boardgame related comics available in the archives. I really enjoyed checking up on it every week while they were publishing, and it’s still fun now to go back and have a look through them every now and again. Here are some of my favourites:
The Shut Up and Sit Down Review of Barenpark
Just watch this review of Barenpark please:
This is in my opinion, the greatest review of all time. It should have millions of views. Paul is a comedic genius.
Memes
If you like low quality memes and boardgames, a good place to find some of them is Instagram, under the tag #boardgamememes. It seems like most other communities (Reddit /r/boardgames and BoardGameGeek) are too serious to allow memes, and on Twitter they are hard to find as they are not organised . There is some good stuff on Twitter, check out @PonchoRebound and Honest Board Games just to name a couple.
The Dragon’s Tomb
The Dragon’s Tomb is a Youtube channel hosted by Jeff Kornberg. Jeff creates high quality and concise rules explanation videos that can help you get up and running when you want to play a new game for the first time. In Jeff’s own words:
A lot of other YouTube channels currently make similar kinds of videos, but most of them get the rules wrong, go on too long, or have boring hosts who are nerdy. My channel aims to fix all that. Each one of my videos concisely covers all rules of each game, while being hosted by someone who isn’t a nerd (me).
To get started, learn how to play the classic Catan from Jeff. Jeff also does great convention coverage – one of my favourite videos from him is his very informative video covering PAX Unplugged. Check out Jeff’s videos and be sure to subscribe, he’s adding new stuff regularly!
Semi Co-op
Semi Co-op is a current webcomic that updates weekly, created and produced by Rachel Kremer and Heinze Havinga from The Netherlands. The pair have a great sense of humour and good knowledge of boardgames, and so the comics they come up with are always very entertaining. Sometimes hit a little too close to home on certain matters. Some of my favourite comics of theirs:
Be sure to check in regularly on their new comics!
A Thread About AI On BoardGameGeek
Normally BoardGameGeek is all serious business, but very occasionally something bubbles up that is pretty funny. This thread about training an AI to generate boardgame names has some great discussion and is generally an entertaining read.
Plumpy Thimble
Plumpy Thimble is what I would call a boardgame comedian. They produce hilarious short boardgame related skits that they upload to their youtube channel quite often.
One of my favourite skits is ‘Deception in Hong Kong: The Movie‘, which if you’ve played the boardgame of, you will find hilarious. I also enjoyed ‘If Boardgames Had Professional Commentators‘ . It also seems like sometimes the channel devolves into providing actual useful content in the form of boardgame reviews. Which I guess are somewhat useful. Ok… they are actually pretty good. But not so funny.
Reddit /r/boardgamescirclejerk
This one is hard to explain for someone who doesn’t know about Reddit, but I think it’s something that can be very funny sometimes and it merits a place on this list. /r/boardgames is an increasingly popular part of the online boardgaming community. /r/boardgamescirclejerk is the anti-/r/boardgames. I’m not going to link to any posts here because almost all of them are making fun of something that was posted over on the main subreddit, and without context they probably all seem like the ravings of mad people. But if you follow /r/boardgames like I do, and you are aware of /r/boardgamescirclejerk, there will be moments where you see a thread on /r/boardgames and just think ‘I need to check /r/boardgamescirclejerk to see what they’ve come up with over there’. And it’s usually a very hilarious parody of the situation.
Thanks for reading! I hope you discovered some new things to spend time laughing at when you’re not playing boardgames, and if you know of any other things out there, please leave them in the comments, and don’t forget to share and subscribe to the blog!
The Boardgame Detective 