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Hey there!
Welcome! You might be wondering who runs this blog, who takes the pictures, who writes the words for each and every post you see here. Well, it’s me! Dario.
Hi.
The next thing you might wonder (or not) is why I even started such a thing in the first place. Truth be told, I needed an outlet. Something that allowed me to marry the three things that I love doing: writing, photography and playing board games. Luckily, that inspiration to do something hit a breaking point when I felt a pang of anxiety that I was reaching a certain age and I wasn’t really offering anything to myself that channeled those three hobbies that I cherish. So I decided to do something about it, take the plunge, buy a domain and start creating.
Thus Cult Cardboard was born.
As a writer, I’ve been doing this off and on for about twenty years, writing for a few blogs and websites—ussoccerplayers.com and Zunited.com (RIP Zune) specifically. Those stints were nice, but I wanted something to call my own and to keep those writing skills up to snuff, which were sorely depreciating in recent years. Hopefully, this iteration of Dario the Writer keeps my chops in shape.
As an amateur photographer, the best part of learning the craft is the pursuit of creating a photograph instead of just taking a photo. I enjoy the outdoors and the vistas it provides, so I naturally developed a love for landscape photography.
I want to use that knowledge to showcase the landscapes of board games. Have you seen the incredible art direction of Teotihuacan? It’s begging to be photographed! So many other games of that artistic ilk need to be photographed and so I want to do my best to display that art in the best light possible, to give it justice. Almost all the pictures here I’ve taken, and I hope when I write about a game, the photos that accompany a post show off the game in style and entice you to check it out.
Lastly, I’ve been playing board games consistently for almost ten years. It all started with (Settlers of) Catan. Like most of today’s gamers, that one single board game opened up the world of modern table top games to most players. Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Torres…the list grew and grew as I started to appreciate how much the hobby had grown. Today, there is no question to the validity that we are in the Golden Age of board games. So if you’ve stumbled onto this blog, I hope that my words give you an idea on what games have to offer and to see if they are the right fit for you.
I do have a philosophy on how I review a board game. I think all independent reviewers have it. A method that takes a board game through its paces, and spits out a definitive conclusive answer to the reviewer if it’s a game that extrudes joy out of them. The way each reviewer does it might differ greatly, as it should, but the outcome has to be good enough to give a conclusion that gives you an understanding if that game is right for you or not.
The way I judge a game and review is not entirely set in stone, but I do try to do these things at the bare minimum before deciding on a review:
Play the game at least three times.
Play the game with at least two-to-three players. Four or more if possible but not necessary.
Play the game with experienced players with knowledge of modern board games.
Why play a game at least three times? The first two plays usually you’re trying to wrap your head around the mechanisms, you get rules wrong and generally you aren’t playing optimally. The learning curve is real. If a game requires more than three plays to find a feel for the game, I will hold off a review until I feel my understanding of it is full. It could take four plays or 10. I don’t know, but at some point, I feel a game’s DNA has been mapped and I can confidently write something about it that I can write as a review.
Why play a game with two or three players? Game groups are hard to come by in this digital age! If you’ve grown up with the internet as your primary source of entertainment, you’ve been conditioned to play online and avoid people like the plague! It’s hard to get a physical game group to meet , so playing games with four other peeps at the same time can be restrictive. Playing with a partner, and a third wheel at times, is far more likely in this day and age. However, if I feel a game would feel better as a four-player affair, and I’ve been managing only two or three-player games, I hold off on a review. If the game manages to still be interesting in smaller player counts and missing out on the maximum player count wouldn’t change my opinion of a game, I go ahead with the review. Simple enough.
Why play with experienced players? Experienced players just make rule explanations easier and we can get to the game’s core quicker, thus understand if a game has a meaningful and interesting decision space. New players just need more time to come to terms with a game and truthfully it would disrupt the flow and may even change the experience that I need to come up with a fair review. However, I love teaching games to newbies. We need more people in this hobby!
And lastly…
What I don’t do in my reviews is write a rules-heavy explanation of the game. I tend to include certain rules if I believe that’s the crux of the interesting decision making within the game. I also don’t talk about component quality or art direction/graphic design unless it’s terribly egregious or supernal. If it’s serviceable, or does its job, I usually don’t bother talking too much of it. I rather devote words towards the meaningful bits of a game.
I also don’t review games that internally I don’t have any desire to play or piques my interest. If it’s a bad fit for me, I just won't play it. So no real-time, war or 18xx games. Just not my cup of tea.
