Happy Valentine's Day! This (bonus) episode is pretty much the opposite of the last one, as we go on an old-fashioned, romantic, and very silly playthrough of Barbara Cartland: A Romance Boardgame. This is a paragraph game based, as you might guess, on a few of Barbara Cartland's 700+ (!) romance novels. Since it's a paragraph game, there's a lot of reading and, well, none of us are actors or even audiobook narrators, so be prepared for a few rough patches. In our defense, the paragraphs in the game had a...lot...of ellipses in weird...places.

Note: This game was published almost 35 years years ago, based on novels that were published 40+ years ago and set 100-200 years ago. The text contains some cultural insensitivity, a LOT of gender stereotyping, and at least one scene that today would be classified as sexual assault. The books and the game are products of their respective times, and while we can laugh about the old-fashioned ideas now, that certainly doesn't mean we approve or support that kind of behavior when there are any real people involved. We hope you understand.

In case you're interested in checking out the source material (but beware spoilers!), the three stories we played through are based on:

• The Dangerous Dandy - Frank and Mike's storyline

Also, here's the iTunes link for Barbara Cartland's album of love songs, and a recipe for Harira. (It'll make sense - well, maybe a tiny bit more sense - once you've heard the episode.)

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• Website: https://www.ascentofboardgames.com/

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

Thank you for listening!