Five Games for Doomsday

I’ve been listening to Ben since the earlier days of his previous podcasting venture, and over the years he has just gotten better and better. I don’t always agree with his opinions, but I never tire of his hard work and dedication to delivering excellent interviews and commentary. He and Steve have developed a comfortable rapport, and the show always delivers some laughs as well as really interesting content. Ben’s game reviews break away from the tired format of “sort of teach the game, just enough to bore you without actually telling you enough to play, what did we like/dislike, etc.” Instead, he puts a game into context with similar games, rants about thematic strengths or weaknesses, treats games as cultural and artistic products and discusses what they bring to our lives. True, there’s a lot of swearing, so if that puts you off be forewarned, but for most of us, that’s “a feature, not a bug”.

A great, talented; funny, sufficiently attractive person doing fantastic, smart, to the point interviews. I wish I was Ben Maddox. Gaby Host of Board Game Snobs

Really like the episodes where he interviews and gets the 5 games from people in the industry. The news shows are…mostly entertaining, somewhat meandering, but when I listen to them they are pretty notable for several intrusive and relatively long commercials. Kind of a big turnoff for me personally. I don’t begrudge the need to monetize the podcast at all, but I guess I’d rather just give on patreon than with mycommercial listening, the way most other boardgame podcasts do.

Excellent, short reviews and superb deep-dive interviews with designers. The only thing I wish is that he’d include the games people pick in the episode description for easy reference. Sometimes I forget what game they’re talking about and they don’t always say the name again!