August. Board games on the left of my desk, books on the right, and I write about both here. Since 2019.
The site exists because of one embarrassing evening. I tried to recommend Concordia to a friend and the only sentence I could produce was "it has Romans in it." She looked at me the way you look at someone who's just said something in a language you don't speak. That night I opened a text file and started forcing myself to write down what I actually thought about the games I finished and the books I read, while I still remembered any of it. The habit took. The file grew into whatever this is.
Two thirds of what I write about is board games. Medium-to-heavy euros mostly, cooperative games, campaign boxes, the odd two-player. The last third is books. Novels I've read at least twice, most of them. I'm often wrong. I try to be wrong in specific ways rather than vague ones.
No comment section, no ads, no tracking. A handful of readers email me every week and that's easily the best part of running this.
Who I am (the short version)
I'm 27. I grew up in Manchester, went to university in Edinburgh, then spent three years in London working my way through translation jobs (mostly Portuguese-to-English legal work, with the occasional literary novel when I'm lucky). In the summer of 2024 my partner got a research post at Universidade Nova and the two of us moved to Lisbon. We're still here.
My gaming group meets every Tuesday at a café called O Bom Fardo, in Rua da Bica. There are six of us. Mário runs the group in the sense that he brings the coffee. We play about a hundred and twenty games a year, mostly medium-heavy euros with the occasional co-op weekend. I own about 240 games, catalogued on Board Game Geek under the username augustvale, and I've been a member there since 2018.
The editorial policy, such as it is
Three rules. I've stuck to them since 2019, and I'm not planning to change them.
- No review copies. Every game on this site I bought at retail, borrowed from a friend, or played through a legal digital implementation (Board Game Arena or a publisher's official app). I've turned down publisher review copies four times now. Nothing personal. It's just that once you've taken one, you're never quite the same reviewer.
- No affiliate links. Nothing on this site links out to Amazon or any storefront I get paid for. When I say "find your local game shop", I mean it. Ask the owner. They'll know what's good.
- No plays, no review. A game needs at least five plays before I'll write it up. Anything shorter I mark as "first impressions" and treat as provisional. Most of the reviews here reflect ten to forty plays, and a handful (Spirit Island, Concordia, Brass) are into the double digits per year.
What I write about
Board games from about 2010 onwards, with the occasional older classic when a new edition prompts a re-look. I write about strategy games (heavy euros, engine builders, economic games), cooperative games, solo games, deck-builders, worker placement, legacy and campaign games, area control, and family games. I write about party games rarely, and about mass-market titles (Monopoly, Risk, Clue) not at all. There are better reviewers for those.
I also write about books. A small shelf, kept deliberately short. If a novel makes it here, it's one I've read twice and expect to read again.
About the site itself
It's static HTML. No build system, no cookies, no trackers, no ads. I write it in a plain text editor, save it, and upload it. The typography is set in Spectral, which loads from Google Fonts (with Georgia as a fallback). Reviews get permanent URLs. When my opinion changes, I add an "updated on" note and keep the original text visible underneath it. I don't rewrite history quietly.