Everyday Meeple

EM - June 21 2020 by Everyday Meeple

Everyday Meeple made a switch to a weekly radio show on our local college station CHMA 106.9 FM. We still record as a podcast as well but most of our shows are light and conversational.

Everyday Meeple made a switch to a weekly radio show on our local college station CHMA 106.9 FM. We still record as a podcast as well but most of our shows are light and conversational.

Everyday Meeple made a switch to a weekly radio show on our local college station CHMA 106.9 FM. We still record as a podcast as well but most of our shows are light and conversational.

EM June 28 2020 by Everyday Meeple

Everyday Meeple made a switch to a weekly radio show on our local college station CHMA 106.9 FM. We still record as a podcast as well but most of our shows are light and conversational.

This week we celebrate the triple-threat designer, artist and publisher, Ryan Laukat of Red Raven games. Ryan is responsible for hit games like Near and Far and Above and Below. He has a fascinating story of how he started in the board game industry as an artist, then a designer. We dig into all of that goodness and go on to gush over our favourite Red Raven games. While we’ve only played a small sampling of his games, the art, mechanics, narrative and world-building at play has left us craving more.

Ryan’s character and setting art bring to mind Disney animation or the whimsical worlds brought to life by Studio Ghibli. His wide range of characters varies from human to robots to anthropomorphic birds and reptiles. His worlds are full of bizarre architecture and buildings that you just want to visit. His written narrative sections are thoughtful and not filled with fantasy tropes. It’s obvious that Laukat has a deep love for board games as an art form and he seems to give his all in his game designs. His games feature hundreds of unique card illustrations, pages upon pages of storytelling and character art that never seems to get reused.

I’ve gushed on enough. Listen on to hear more praise for the man of our hour and hear about us exploring the underground caves of Above and Below and swashbuckling our way through Islebound. We also eagerly anticipate the time when we can enter the other worlds that Ryan Laukat has so lovingly created and speculate on other games of his like Empires of the Void 2 and the upcoming Sleeping Gods.

Long live Red Raven!

With a quick nod to Elisabeth Hargrave and the Wingspan team for winning 8 Golden Geek awards we move into a discussion of Champions of Midgard and how much fun it is losing.

In this episode we try and tackle deck-building but it is such a vast topic that we really just scratch a small itch on the surface. A brief time-line from the explosive force that was Magic: The Gathering to the emergence of a new mechanic through Donald X Vaccarino's Dominion. There is so much to love with deck-building and so little time in our show to give it the attention it deserves.

Some of the games we bring up: MTG, Dominion, Clank!, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, Ascension, Dale of Merchants, Quest for El Dorado, Vikings Gone Wild, Thunderstone, Baseball Highlights 2045, Abandon all Artichokes, Slay the Spire

The Isolation Episodes #3 by Everyday Meeple