About

Games Night Guru is mostly written by me, Sam.

But tabletop gaming is largely a social activity, and there are many people who contribute indirectly: family and friends I play with, people who have allowed use of their images and not least pal Joe who helped design and build the site and contributed to the content over many years.

Although the solo-game aspect of board-gaming has been steadily growing, a massive part of what I love about games is the connection they cultivate in a world where we are increasingly isolated and focused on screens. Board games offer a social structure: a reason to gather together, interact, engage our brains, play. They offer cognitive, tactile and haptic feedback; the fun of figuring something out, the joy of pitting one’s wits against each other – or combining them – a challenge it’s okay to fail at, a story, surprise, laughter. Modern games also offer a huge variety of choice; not just thematically, but in the weight of decisions, the length of time, collaborate or compete, ponder gently over a Sunday morning coffee or go nuts on a Saturday night.

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Games Night Guru is, with a few exceptions, not an encyclopaedic learning resource, and steers clear of going into the intricacies of the rules, especially on more involved games. Most have a rulebook online somewhere, either with the publisher or available for free at boardgamegeek.com. The idea here is a rough guide to the game along with some subjective thoughts on my experience of it. Please note the word subjective! I play a lot of different games each week and my perceptions land somewhere between the vast choices games offer in the current climate, the inevitable overlap of many titles, and the fact I am fortunate to enjoy probably around 99.9% of them, even if they don’t directly align to my preferences.

Those preferences tend towards less dense experiences with some heads-up interaction, but because I have a pretty broad palette on gaming it’s easier to say what I don’t enjoy, which is ornate, complicated titles with minimal (if any) interaction that take 2-4 hours to resolve and there’s scant (if any) attention on what anyone else is doing until you compare scores at the end.  It’s worth pointing out because there are obviously many who do enjoy these games, and they might find this site regularly lukewarm on their favourites. I’m also a little ambivalent about skirmish games, where players make their way through a landscape shooting at aggressors. I guess I feel computers do those immersive games so well (even though I don’t play them myself), board games feel like a pale imitation.

Everything else – card games, abstract games, dexterity games, co-op games, combative games and more… these make up the vast majority of the site and I hope you can feel the enthusiasm.

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You can contact me on gamesnightguru@gmail.com