Gosh, this is brilliant analysis.

Sometimes when I engage in good board game media I want to play a game - I watch Tom review Oath, and I want to play Oath.

When I watch Amabel's videos, I want to make games.

I think the idea is that Companies are really greedy, so of course they would do that, but that does not feel accurate. If you had all the money, why would you want to bring in something so chaotic as a Killer Alien? Billionaires want to maintain the status quo.

Make of that what you will.

From the point of view of playing Root they add a kind of need for fighting, and they are mechanically innovative.

From a political stance I'm not sure they were any more or less political than any other faction, but they were pretty mean.

LD score for tokens which are non-aggressive, and so the balance is between scoring and growing.

LD need to be picking up points from other sources, such as building, or more probably taking things off the board.

The Frog Suit that LD bring with them change the board, and force them into conflict.

A 7 Wonders (1st Ed) board after a game is such a pleasing thing to look at.

Rope!

Back in the early 1990s, Alan Moore, in his introduction to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, notes that misogyny is the core of the Bond character.

Perhaps if you can't write Robin Hood without the social justice ("Rob from the rich..."), you can't write a Bond who does not dislike women.

Bras: Birmingham

(although, to be clear, I don't have a beef with lingerie, I just like the word play)

When you buy Lords of Vegas it's sort of obligatory to buy some genuine Poker Dice and some Chips too. It's an expensive business :)

I concur. Perhaps have a box out with "Anatomy of a Card" so it appears "outside" of the rules,

in conflict with each other, but you don't realise that most of the time, so it feels less stressful.

ruin your evening.

So if cozy is the opposite (as I think) then it describes games where you are unaware, or it is impossible, for your evening to get messed up.

So all it really takes to make a cozy game is to hide the parts where conflict arises. Great Western Trail is a lot of players...

If "cozy" means anything in board games, it is the opposite of "stressful", and stressful games are those where you need to focus on the game at all times because you are about to be screwed over.

Playing Age of Steam (as I did this week) you are constantly aware that someone is about to...

Did you like it? It can play like Chinatown, with everyone trading all the time, or it can play like Tammany Hall with people very cagey playing area control. I love it.

And a very good discussion it is too.