TableTop
For those of you looking to get into tabletop board games, but not sure how, a great place to start is with Geek & Sundry’s show TableTop hosted by none other than Star Trek The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher, Wil Wheaton who does a fabulous job of explaining the games and keeping the interest level high.
TableTop is a very successful web series that effectively focuses on what are known as gateway games. In other words games that are fun, easy to learn and provide a great experience into this new world of board games. Just entering into it’s 2nd season, TableTop has done a great job of putting out high quality videos with stars and well known personalities in the geek culture such as Felicia Day (who run’s Geek & Sundry,) Veronica Belmont, Colin Ferguson (Eureka) and many others.
Each episode runs 20 – 30 minutes as the group plays a board game of the week in kind of a “celebrity poker” format. Will starts each episode with a basic run down of the game and its basic rules and then its jump right into it. As the game is being played, on screen hints and tips help to explain the rules so you know what is going on as the game is “paraphrased” in content. The players get little spots in the video where they can discuss their strategy and make jokes about the progress of the games so far. They don’t show the whole game being played as that would get a bit monotonous, they edit it down to key moments and funny bits.
Last season demonstrated great board games such as Pandemic, Settlers of Catan as well as card-based games like Gloom and Fluxx. You really couldn’t find a better primer into the world of today’s board games. Don’t worry, there won’t be any games that are too heavy as the show’s focus is to bring new players into gaming and not have them overwhelmed with deep strategy games.
For more information about TableTop, visit the Geek & Sundry website: http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/
Other links to TableTop:
http://www.youtube.com/user/geekandsundry/featured
https://www.facebook.com/geekandsundry
https://twitter.com/geekandsundry
https://plus.google.com/+GeekandSundry
This article was orginally posted on Geek Eccentric: http://www.geekeccentric.com/geek-sundrys-tabletop-board-game-web-series/