In the interest of full disclosure, ChatGPT wrote the title of this post and helped with grammar issues in this and other posts.
I was watching a movie review, or rather a review about movies, and it struck me that board games don’t receive the deep analysis that movies do. One of my favorite but less often watched YouTube channels is Cinemastix. This is the channel of Danny Boyd, who creates video essays about topics in film, and sometimes just about a specific movie. Maybe it’s time to start examining board games, not in the formulaic style we usually see, but in a way that looks closer at design decisions and how a game has things in common with other games. Maybe I can write an essay about a game and how it fits into board game culture, or how it has themes common to other board games. Or I’ll focus on a specific aspect of games and explore how one game reflects or expresses that idea. I’ll give this a shot: