Welcome back! This month's topic is "Batteries Included" - board games with electronic elements (or, in some early cases, electrical elements) that are an essential part of the game. We had a few audio issues this time around, so I apologize for the sometimes uneven sound quality; I promise we'll have it back under control next time!

Here are a few links to some "extras" you'll hear us mention along the way:

The epic Egyptian imagery of Electra, 1910: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/598808/electra

A great Dark Tower fan site, with pictures of Bob Pepper's fantastic artwork for Dark Tower (and Dragonmaster): http://well-of-souls.com/tower/

Orson Welles assaults the Dark Tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrY7MWEkwE

The Nightmare 2 music video - don't say you weren't warned! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9ad5JXTnFE

A sample of how Dropmix can work, since we utterly failed to record any of our own experiments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcQs1FJuJ1U

We also include a brief digression on which miniatures game has the most difficult miniatures to assemble. However, we did edit out our 18-minute digression on the relative merits of Community and Rick & Morty. Maybe we'll put that on our Patreon site someday. You know, if we ever actually have a Patreon site.

The other thing we cut is a 10-minute discussion of the Weave role-playing game. It's certainly in keeping with the theme of the episode, but since Weave is an RPG rather than a board game, we thought it was something we could safely leave out of the main episode (especially since this one was already a bit longer than usual). That said, if you're interested in hearing it, let us know; we'd be glad to release it as a supplemental "expansion pack" mini-episode.

As usual, we'd love to hear what you think - please drop us a line via any (or all!) of the following methods:

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And if you have the time to give us a review on iTunes, it would really help us in our efforts to reach more listeners.

Intro and outro music is Evening Melodrama by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

The Ascent of Board Games is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Some rights reserved.

Thank you for listening!