Tips | Casual Game Revolution

Tips

As a ghost, give nonverbal clues to your teammates to help them solve your murder in Paranormal Detectives by Lucky Duck Games. Plus: party games, Gen Con and Origins 2019, streamlining your gaming experience, and an interview with Floodgate Games.

Do you get headaches or feel anxiety when you use Board Game Geek? Do you enter the site hoping to find a fun new game, but run away feeling too overwhelmed to continue? You're not alone.

Every year the board game industry grows and incorporates more and more dedicated players. The last few years have been termed the "board game renaissance," and in a lot of ways, it truly is the best era in gaming thus far. By the time industry magazine ICv2 reports of the most recent figures (typically 10-20% annual growth since around 2008), a plethora of new board game publishers have already sprung up. With the growth of Kickstarter, starting a publishing company has become a lot more accessible for those that don't have the financial resources to afford printing thousands of copies of a game on their own.

Running a Kickstarter campaign is a lot of work. There are a plethora of hoops that a creator must jump through in order to be successful.

Many casual gamers enjoy the casual gameplay experience of games like Poker and Blackjack. However, the stakes get higher when real money is involved.

Board games have a higher learning curve than many other forms of entertainment. Here are some ideas to reduce the barriers for both the learner and the teacher. Originally published in the Fall 2012 issue of Casual Game Insider.

Queen Games’ Kingdom Builder has won the 2012 Spiel des Jahres award – learn how to play and find out how the publisher came to be. Plus: an in depth look at tabletop funding on Kickstarter by game weight, a new hierarchy of gamers, helpful tips from a successful game retailer, and what the board game industry can learn from the casual video game movement.

With the holidays and family time ahead of us, let’s discuss the merits of sharing game play with our loved ones during this season, and how these times actually become in our memories perhaps the most cherished of the gifts we share.

Stronghold Games releases a new line of casual card games - is this a new direction for them? Plus: details about the Casual Game Revolution, 7 tips for learning and teaching a game more effectively, what "casual" means to game elitists and newbies, and how casual games were perfect for an international student event.