Barnes’ Best 2018 - Games of the Year (yawn)

Well, when you get paid $2k to stand in front of a wall of games and be mildly annoying and vaguely amiable...why bother going in depth or, you know, being accurate.

Does anyone else remember the Avalanche at Yeti Mountain debacle? He panned the game but bungled the rules so badly that it was entirely his own fault. They actually took the review down because it was so apparent, but the sales damage was already done.

You know you don't have to read or interact with Tom Vasel or his videos, right?

jeb wrote: You know you don't have to read or interact with Tom Vasel or his videos, right?

Unless you publish a game.

Sagrilarus wrote:

jeb wrote: You know you don't have to read or interact with Tom Vasel or his videos, right?

Unless you publish a game.

That's the key. I'm acquaintances with the designer (he's a local, brings stuff to Unpub) and from what I understand it gutted any chances of the game being a success.

The Dice Tower folks are (mostly) good people. Genuinely. It's just grown too damn big and they aren't equipped to handle it.

jeb wrote: You know you don't have to read or interact with Tom Vasel or his videos, right?

Under most circumstances I would agree with this logic, but not here. We sometime joke around here about “Tastemaker Barnes,” but Vasel really is a tastemaker, possibly THE tastemaker. He’ll play something that you’ll really like that you’ll play more than once and you want to see it succeed and do well, but he plays it once and for whatever reason, be it that the game requires multiple plays to assess or he just couldn’t be bothered and he’ll trash it. You’ll see a ton of replies on the video saying, “Thanks, Tom, don’t need to waste my money on that one!”

Obviously, I understand that he’s not so much the problem as his audience is. These are people who seem to miss that they’ve just watched a 15+ minute rules explaination, with a 30% chance that the rules were incorrect and a 95% chance that its followed up with, “I’m not going to show you every rule here.” None of these people are asking, “If you’re going to prattle on about the rules for that long, complete with out of focus shots of the components and incorrect rules, why waste your time at all?” They also don’t seem bothered by the fact that there is no in depth analysis of the game or where it fits into the larger picture. He could essentially get on there and say, “I like the pretty pictures on the cards,” and they’d still chuck money hand over fist at him once a year so that he can put it into anything BUT producing a higher quality product (but hey, GOTTA BUY MORE HATS).

Both sides are the problem here and sorry, I see it as a big enough one that it should be addressed.

Like it or not, Dice Tower has a lot of influence on the hobby, at a time when there is so much product being released that no one (no organization) can devote the time necessary to truly assess what's coming out. He is the #2 influencer behind BGG from what I can tell, certainly his business is.

I'd be curious to know how much of Vasel's time is spent working with individual games. I'd guess that managing the Dice Tower business would be 40 a week all on its own. He needs to play games in order to remain relevant of course.

Sagrilarus wrote: Like it or not, Dice Tower has a lot of influence on the hobby, at a time when there is so much product being released that no one (no organization) can devote the time necessary to truly assess what's coming out. He is the #2 influencer behind BGG from what I can tell, certainly his business is.

I'd be curious to know how much of Vasel's time is spent working with individual games. I'd guess that managing the Dice Tower business would be 40 a week all on its own. He needs to play games in order to remain relevant of course.

When you put it like that, it kind of makes you think that some of his enduring appeal is because he kind of is the perfect spokesperson for the portion of the hobby that plays their [likely Kickstarted] games once, rates it on BGG and moves on to the next thing.

I think he plays stuff more than once, but definitely not everything.

Man, if I had the ambition and the time (rest assured, folks, I don’t), I’d fix this whole video review thing.

This is all fair, but I'd rather we talk about things that interest us and Barnes' list than about times that Tom Vasel's been wrong about something. I feel like I can get that elsewhere if I wanted to (I do not). Just grousing, I guess.

I am just not playing new games anymore. I feel like games I buy have to be better than games I already have, and the games I have are fucking great.

Vasel's not always correct, but he does convey the "feeling" of playing a game pretty well. And he does that in 10-15 minutes video. Not many reviewers do that. I think he was just messing around/being hyperbolic with the ASL comment.

Man, if I had the ambition and the time (rest assured, folks, I don’t), I’d fix this whole video review thing.

And Vasel invested on this. We all saw how he began. Really don't understand all the hate here.