It’s time to add some ritz, so welcome to the Blitz! On this edition of Spotlight, we welcome Ambie Valdés, Cassadi Thomas, and Crystal Pisano of the Board Game Blitz podcast! Please tell us about yourselves.

Ambie: Hi! I'm Ambie, and I like board games. You can read all our bios on the About Us section of our site, but basically I've been playing games all my life, and currently I like strategic games with mechanics that work well with the theme. I'm part of Board Game Blitz (obviously), a ~30 minute bi-weekly podcast about board games! We also have a YouTube channel where I've been making quick instructional videos (I actually thought of the name ‘Board Game Blitz’ because of those videos first, and combined it with the podcast). Outside of board gaming, I enjoy arts & crafts, singing, baking, and watching anime. I’ve tried to combine my hobbies together (like making random board game related accessories/things). I also make board game song parodies, and I'm a moderator on /r/boardgames on Reddit.

Cassadi: Cassadi here! I also like board games! I tend to play a lot of light (easy to learn quick to play) games with my regular group, but I do like to dig into more rules heavy games. Puerto Rico being one of my favorites! Non board game related things, I like to crochet and love watching Jeopardy! Spending time with the kiddo, Boomer, and cats is pretty awesome too!

Ambie: Woo crochet! I like crocheting too. Cassadi’s been making some really pretty things!

Crystal: I’m Crystal! I’m a Marketing Communications Manager for a credit card company by day and a board game enthusiast by night (or technically 24/7). I’ve written board game content for a couple different websites in addition to co-hosting our podcast. I grew up in the midwest then moved to the west side of the country back in 2008. I’ve always considered myself to be a geek/nerd/dork/etc and am happy to share my passion for the hobby with others (sometimes a bit more enthusiastically than is probably necessary). Thematic games are where it’s at for me. I’ll try just about anything once, but dry euros are usually something I avoid. Oh and I, like Ambie, am also a moderator on /r/boardgames.

Ambie and the GenCANTerpillar.

Cassadi

Crystal in the World’s Largest Meeple.

You’re known for being a fast podcast, so in ten words or less why is your favorite game your favorite game?

Ambie: I don't have a favorite game anymore! What do I do? (Calvin’s Note: This is 12 words, but I’llallowit.gif) (Ambie's Note: It’s 11 - you can't count my name as one of them! =P)

Cassadi: Fast-paced, easy to teach, wordy, easy to transport, BANANAS! If you couldn’t tell from that, my favorite game is Bananagrams! I’ve talked about this game a few times on the podcast I think, but I always enjoyed playing Scrabble growing up. Bananagrams is a more unique, faster, more entertaining version of that for me. I love seeing the words other people come up with when they’re forced to play quickly vs. having time to think about your letters in Scrabble.

Crystal: You get to accuse your friends of being frakking toasters. (*cue laugh track*) The other girls seem to be amused by my obsession with Battlestar Galactica (I mention it at least once in most of our episodes), but the game still absolutely blows my mind. I think games based on IPs get a bad rap, and for good reason! Most of them aren’t great or even good. Battlestar Galactica not only captures the feel of the TV series it is based on, but it has great mechanics to boot. I know plenty of people who enjoy the game without ever having watched the show (but seriously, everyone should watch the show. It’s so good.)

Oh man BSG. That show is a modern classic, and one of the better thematic implementations of an IP too. I think traitor elements are slightly underused in games - maybe there should be TRAITOR BANANAGRAMS where everyone is trying to build the nicest board and one player pretends they’re from Canada where they only speak French.

Crystal: Traitor elements seem difficult to do well, and I definitely wouldn’t want the market to be saturated with them, because as much as I love BSG or Dead of Winter, I don’t really like betraying a table of my friends all the time.

Cassadi: I kind of love the idea of traitor Bananagrams! I might have to make a variant. Hmmmmm…. (now deep in thought)

Here’s a question I haven’t asked anyone else ever - Do you think your perfect game has already been created?

Ambie: Probably not. There can always be improvements, and my tastes keep changing too!

Dear designers: don’t make any more games for Ambie. She’s impossible.

Ambie: Or I'm providing a challenge! Come as close to perfect as possible! But seriously, “perfect” is tough.

This was taken at Ambie’s wedding. I’m not kidding.

Cassadi: This question is basically impossible for me to answer. Is there ever going to be such a thing as a perfect game? My taste in games has changed considerably over the last few years, and I expected it will continue to do so. To totally contradict what I just said, I feel like there are several games that can fit perfectly for the occasion or group you’re gaming with. For example, there’s 8 of us, we’ve all been drinking, and we all want to play together. Clearly Terra Mystica is not the answer here, but Secret Hitler could be perfect!

I need to play Terra Mystica one day, now that I’m finally getting into Euros. Crystal, what about you? Has your favorite game been designed?

Crystal: No and I don’t think it will ever be possible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an optimist, but I think most gamers (myself included) game differently in different places, at different times, and with different groups. Something perfect for me at home to play with friends might be a horrible choice with strangers at a convention. That being said, I could speculate what “Crystal’s perfect game” might be composed of. It would be thematic and based on something I already adore, it would be medium length, medium weight, play well with 4ish players, have really amazing artwork, and have some kind of cool toy factor with its components.

So: Cry Havoc: Star Trek Edition is what you’re saying.

Crystal: I didn’t dislike Cry Havoc, but I didn’t completely dig it either. It’s tough because I love theme but dislike antagonistic combat. But yeah, something like that.

Apart from gaming, what other pursuits (nerdy or otherwise) are you into right now that you think our audience should definitely get into?

Cassadi: Crochet! It’s not just a hobby for women anymore. It’s one of my go-to winding down activities, plus who doesn’t want a warm hat or cozy pair of fingerless gloves (obviously it’s getting cooler here in Ohio)?

Cassadi made this!

I need to refer you to my girlfriend, she gets cold at the drop of a glove.

Cassadi: Haha, me too!! I work on crochet projects more in the winter to help me keep warm!

Crystal: I actually don’t have a lot of hobbies. Gaming is pretty much it for me. I pick up some video games occasionally and I’m looking forward to the new Nintendo console coming out next year. Other things I do enjoy include karaoke, binge-watching TV shows, and travelling with my husband.

And cosplay

“Best Karaoke song of all time”: Go.

Crystal: Worst is easier to answer. While I adore Queen, I HATE when people try to karaoke Bohemian Rhapsody. Don’t do it. EVER. No one can sing that song well. Also, best is relative because it differs depending on the singer. A few of my go-to songs are Maneater by Hall & Oates, True by Spandeau Ballet, and Just Lose It by Eminem.

Ambie: Board game related things (parodies, Board Game Blitz stuff & editing, moderating, playing games) take up a lot of my time, but recently I've been playing this PC game called Battlerite. It's an arena style fighting game where you're on a team (2v2 or 3v3) and just want to kill the other team. No leveling, respawning, or items. And every shot must be aimed, so it's pretty hard, but really fun. Each game lasts ~5-10 minutes, so it's great when I don't have time to play a longer game.

Ooh! I’ve heard of that. Who’s your favorite hero?

Ambie: I really enjoy playing as Lucie. She's a support character (healer) with some good control attacks (like making the enemy run away or petrifying them). I also used to play Battlerite’s predecessor, Bloodline Champions, and the Alchemist (which Lucie is based on) was one of my favorite heroes there.

KirbyLucie by Ambie

Board Game Blitz has an unofficial mascot in Cassadi’s corgi Boomer. If you had to have an official mascot, what would you want it to be?

Ambie: Uhhh… I guess our logo has that hourglass. So.. a cute hourglass. I don't know.

Cassadi: It’s been mentioned on Twitter recently that the Battlestar Galactica game is our mascot, but only Crystal is really obsessed with that one. :P I would have to agree with Ambie that the hourglass cutout in our logo is probably the best actual mascot. Though, Boomer wouldn’t be upset if he was our official Corgi mascot!

Crystal: We’d never really discussed this, but I have to agree that the hourglass would work. I guess we haven’t thought about it since we don’t have a need (yet). Someday, when Board Game Blitz has taken over the world (lol) we might need to think about it more seriously. Also, my dogs would be totally jealous if Boomer got to be our only animal mascot!

Boomer

Crystal’s dogs: Lana, Sterling, and Maeby

Ambie’s Meepillows

I’m totally rooting for you to take over the world. Maybe I can co-rule as your official PR team. Speaking of co-ruling: What was the most unexpectedly difficult part of Board Game Blitz? What part were you expecting to be awful but was totally easy and awesome?

Ambie: I'm not sure if we had any unexpected difficulties. I think we expected a lot of them. Coming up with a name was a little hard. And actually getting the ball rolling and starting the podcast took a while. I'm also not sure if anything has been totally easy and awesome - maybe Twitter stuff. I'm not a social media person, so I told Crystal to do Twitter stuff, and we've exploded there! Pretty awesome (although from her point of view, maybe not easy).

Cassadi: We did so much research before even beginning to record that, I think, we were ready and expecting EVERYTHING to be difficult. Ambie handles all of our editing LIKE A CHAMP! and Crystal handles the social media ALSO LIKE A CHAMP! Honestly, I keep feeling bad because I want to contribute more on the backend of things. So, I guess for me, the most difficult part is time. Having a tiny human at home I don’t have as much time as I would like to assist these wonderful women. Also, recently, finding time to record was mildly difficult since I’m the only one of the 3 of us in EST.

Crystal: I think we’ve been incredibly smart and lucky so far and therefore haven’t run into many problems. Communication can be difficult at times since we all live so far away from each other and basically rely on facebook messenger. We talk there just about every day. It would be so nice to be able to have the three of us in a room together to talk and brainstorm. Skype just isn’t quite the same, although it has certainly worked well enough so far. I think the part that I was most scared of was the fact that I was entering into a big endeavor with people who were, for all intents and purposes, complete strangers. As it turns out, both Ambie and Cassadi are amazing people who I am so happy to now call friends, but when we first started talking I worried that the whole thing would fail or there would be drama. There really has been no drama at all and that’s super cool.

A freak storm moves the Board Game Blitz crew to a floating island in the sky. You have all the modern amenities but for some mythic reason you can only bring one game that the three of you have to play together FOREVER. What is the game?

Ambie: Wow this is super tough because we have such different tastes in games! Also we've never played a game together. Although if we had all the modern amenities, couldn't we make our own games or play games online?

Cassadi: My first thought was something modular so the game play is different enough to keep us wanting to play. I was thinking Food Chain Magnate, but that’s probably just because I played it recently… Maybe Mice & Mystics because we could write our own campaigns and make new board pieces if necessary! That could be fun.

Crystal: We all really do have such different taste in games that this question is nearly impossible to answer. And, as Ambie said, the three of us have never gamed together. We’d need something with a lot of variety and replayability. With really strong mechanics, but some great theming as well. The thought of only playing one game forever is making me a bit anxious so I’m just going to say I don’t know and leave it at that.

I like all your answers, except Ambie, who’s cheating. Although I GUESS if you had to have a floating island you COULD have Internet and a printer and some markers… so maybe you could make up your perfect game from your answers above!

Ambie: See? I wasn't cheating.

And finally, do you have any cool spoilerz for what listeners can expect from BGBlitz in the future?

Ambie: Nope! We come up with our episodes as we go!

Cassadi: Yeah, we really have no idea what we’re going to talk about until a few days before we record usually which keeps us on our toes! But! We are all meeting for the first time at Meeplecon in March, so I bet there’s something cool to look forward to from that! ;)

Crystal: Well the other girls didn’t want to spill any beans, but I’m going to pour out just a few. All three of us are attending MeepleCon in Las Vegas March 17-19. It will be the first time the three of us have been in the same room at the same time! We’ll also be working on a project related to the podcast during that weekend, but I can’t say much about that yet.

Additionally, we have some tentative plans to do one or two crossover episodes with other board game podcasts in the near future (coughcoughDINGANDDENT) but that stuff hasn’t been completely nailed down yet. We have a really fun plan for one of them that I am hoping will happen early in 2017.

We just want to keep making content that we enjoy producing and other people enjoy engaging with. We want to help grow the hobby. We want to help the hobby move toward being more diverse and inclusive. We want to have fun playing games and talking about them.

Ambie: Oooh I’m super excited for MeepleCon and our special project! Here’s a hint - it’ll be super sweet!

Thank you Board Game Blitz for coming to this SUPER LONG SPOTLIGHT. It may be betraying your core values but I’m sure you’ll agree with was worth it.

Crystal: Thanks for having us! We’re a little crazy, but we’re having fun... and to me, that’s the whole point of venturing into an endeavor such as a podcast.

Say bye everyone!

Ambie: Bye everyone!

Cassadi: Bye everyone!

Crystal: Bye everyone!

Spotlight - Board Game Blitz

Calvin Wong

Raf Reviews - Cthulhu Wars

Calvin's Corner - Putting the Cape in Caper: Age of Thieves

Calvin's Corner - Fog of War: the Twilight Struggle Killer

Episode 47 - Other People's Fun

Charlie's Take - Gloom of Kilforth

Episode 46 - Wasteland Express Delivery Service Review

Raf Reviews - Spoils of War

Raf Reviews - Oaxaca

Bonus Episode - Warhammer 40k Dark Imperium