(I haven't actually got a copy yet, but if I pretend I have my blog gives me a nice cover picture to sit alongside this, so shhh!)
After a delay of quite a few months this book is apparently just back from the printers. But on a production with this many contributors, the odd hiccup is to be expected.
As with the previous one, it's a book of short essays on the favourite board, card & hobby games of a bevvy of games designers & games industry luminaries. This time the focus is on family games, as opposed to the RPG, wargame and CCG slant of the previous volume.
And as with Hobby Games: The 100 Best, once the list of essays was revealed I thought it would be interesting to be able to see the games being written about. So here's my companion piece to the book.
I read this great book of essays recently. Successful games designers of all stripes writing about the games closest to their hearts. It's a fun read, though some of the essays struggle a bit in evoking the appeal of games you've never seen before. Especially since the book contains no illustrations.
To help with that, I've put together a kind of "Hobby Games - A Visual Companion". For the most part, I tried to find the cover art for the game edition specified in each essay, but there may be one or two that are incorrect.
The board & card game imagery was relatively easy to source through the BoardGameGeek API, with a bit of manual tweaking. But I was stuck for RPG data until BGG added rpg.geekdo.com to their portfolio just the other week and I was finally able to fill in the gaps. A very welcome addition, I'd say, and well worth a look, though it can be a touch sluggish at times.
And finally, if you have the book and find the thumbnail page at all useful, you might also be interested in Alan De Smet's various dissections of the book's data.
I should also mention that there's a companion volume, Family Games: The 100 Best, due out later this month.
