Jeremy Howard of Man vs. Meeple

0:10 welcome to brains on games i'm dr brian mcdonald in this episode i'm going to share with you an interview that i did with jeremy howard from man vs meeple now jeremy knows everything there is to know about board games so i was really excited to talk to him especially since he doesn't always get to talk about the family weight kinds of games or the the educational kinds of games that we talk about here at brains on games so i learned a lot about some new board games that i'd never tried before and hopefully you'll enjoy this discussion with jeremy let's start with this why don't you tell my audience a little bit about yourself who you are where you're from and how you got into games oh my name is jeremy howard i uh hail from milwaukee wisconsin i've been living here the majority of my life uh so yeah i've been a well traveled i was in the military for a little while um yeah i i've been playing games since i was a little one i've had stints where i don't feel like i was playing games but it's always been in me and it also started i think with i think it all started with a ball super ball and some jacks so i try to tell people you know like i like dexterity games in the beginning i guess right but it's a game and uh you know i've always liked to play games i come from a family of games but i think board games it really hooked for me when i had some stuff donated to me to our boys and girls club like batman and stratego uh you know all these uh you know tiddlywinks pokino you know and uh risk just all these

1:42 games then i got an opportunity to play and then you know going to the suburbs of the school in the suburbs like being exposed to like arkhan which is like battle chess and you know like just just different type of stuff like that but when i got older i was dating someone and i just kind of you know play like family parker games and hungry hippos but like when i got older i came back from the military i played with my friend and he had katan and he had um carcassonne we played d and d for the first time you know those types of things that kind of like adult you played dnd for the first yeah like like these primey for all these things you know um you know what's interesting now that we're just thinking about this i know we're gonna be talking about development interesting thing when i was learning to read i was kind of late to the reading you know like uh just taking it on one of the first things this is insane like how i'm just thinking of this on the flight but like one of those books that i had was a d i i believe if i could find it it was a d book and it had a section on dragons i believe and i just read that over and over and i thought it was so cool because it taught me about all these different types of dragons and what was a wyvern what was this moving like how they aged and like which how was one more power from the other and i read that book over and over and over again so like i always had some gaming in my life and then in 2015 like that's when i officially kind of came back in um you know long live my you know james uh

3:13 james gadashik when he passed my wife he's like what do you want to do like what's a hobby you want to get back into to kind of like get us out of this funk and i said i want to get back into board games and she's like i'll tell you what i'll give you some money go buy all the board games you want and i started with mage night and if you guys start with page night you're getting this night behind you it's a good place to start you can play anything if you can get the rage night so uh yeah so that's that's kind of why i'm here and now i've been creating content for about three years now and i love it i love i love informing people about these board games man awesome and do you have okay because on my channel we talk about games and the skills that can be practiced or developed by playing them yeah and sometimes we talk about games that are sort of explicitly educational kinds of games but a lot of the time they're not meant to be educational tools or things you would bring into the classroom necessarily do you have a favorite game that might promote some kind of a skill i like the dexterity games i'll be honest with you i still like those but a game that's not educational that still maybe would help a kid or a parent develop some kind of an ability you know so i just right away i want to make sure we emphasize this and i don't know how much you've focused on this and i really think this is something you can focus on even just for a while like a series of games is just abstract games

4:45 like let's start where it starts like let's not let's not go so big you know like let's not go to the cool part of the store let's go right up front right up front right next there you know right next to the checkers right next to the chess sets and pick up your game of courvo pick up your game of pilos pick up your game of abalone you know pick up these games i got one right here called squadro this is an amazing game um gigamic i think it's called gigabit they make a whole bunch of these types of games and uh squadro i mean just a great game you're you know you're you're going you're taking your pieces and you're going a certain amount of spaces one way and then the other way it's slower going back and it's treated like you know and the cool part is is if someone jumps you you have to go back to where you started so it's like you have to start thinking about these skills that kind of like you know um oh wait i can speed across here cool well then somebody's gonna be waiting for you when you get back because they may move their one piece one and wait for you or they may move like kind of set a trap for you and then they go but they got to get across so it's like it's a really really interesting pull and push like and i like watching kids brains work when they play that kind of stuff oh it's a super special game yeah predicting where pieces are gonna go super special if you've ever played quirkle have you played quirkle before i haven't played oh i've seen oh my gosh so you pull these tiles out of a bag

6:18 and they all have these different shapes and colors colors and shapes on the towels and what you're doing is placing the tiles and you're trying to get certain like matches so you're trying to get matches of colors matches of shapes matches of uh a full sequence which is called quartal so if you get all of them all of them singles together you get quartal and you score points and it's just interesting to watch kids count you know do some some counting and multipliers and that that quirkle is like the reason that's a there's a reason why that game sells like crazy is because it's such a really good family game and it really sees where your kids are as far as mental math goes without being too heavy you know like um and i like that kind of stuff like let's let's just introduce kids the skills i um this uh these here now i have these and i it may sound like i'm being promo here because i just got these sent to me but these but these uh these think fun games makes these games that are like this where they're like deduction puzzles and uh this one right here man i gotta let everybody on the planet know about and it's called a minecraft travel puzzle okay okay and it's like a game where you just basically um they give you these pictures they give you these pictures and you have to deduce where the uh the minecraft pieces goes but these are on magnets that you get to put on the board and kind of figure out where they go on the board and you can check the solutions and stuff like that out

7:49 in the back of the book but i like these types of things because you can sit down and and you know just like like programming if then you know that kind of stuff like that and i just i just like games that teach us small skills that you can see where kids are at and then you can kind of reinforce that with with teachable moments i know we had talked about um publishers like genius games we talked about uh like offline we had talked about this stuff before they have great teaching tools we uh talk about animal animal upon animal you know some base basic game just learning how to fit shapes building these tiers and things like that hubba's got a host of games that do that and they are there's one i'm thinking of hamster roll hamster roll and also for um peaceable kingdoms which does kids games too that are family games they do cooperative games as well so they have these two games hamster roll and then they have gnomes at night and what you have to do is in both of these games you may have one ability another person may have another ability but you got to talk through it to make both of you guys work at the same time okay so like in hamster role you're really trying to prepare for a season so you really have to talk through and this is a great opportunity to communicate see where your communication skills are at and figure out hey how we're going to grab these resources and get it back

9:19 to our little borough area in time we don't run out of time and in gnomes at night you are literally have a board that looks like battleship board but it's got magnets on both sides and you have you both have two different patterns that you got to get you but you got to get these pieces in time so you're like hey i need you to move left can i go this far can you go up can i go down it adults love it too it's completely crazy um but it's all communication and that's what you want you want communication um i believe that you know communication learning the basics and then seeing where your child is at but it all starts with these abstract games i try to tell you don't overthink it i'll start with abstract and then move forward from there because you're unlocking a lot of basic things that'll be in every game you know like worker placement is not necessarily going to teach you too much but work replacement like give and take once they understand like you know or like when i play like raccoon tycoon that teach people teaches people simple stocks like buy and sell you see i'm saying buy and sell but they they may not be ready for that they may just need to know like hey i want to put down a worker and exchange things for something else they don't know like stock rising and falling yet but i can teach the beginning of that in montana you know a game like montana it's very very easy so like i like that kind of stuff where by the way that's a really good game to

10:50 talk about you know like like yeah like montana you're teaching me a new one yeah that's a really good game to talk about you know um because it does such a good job of like managing basic resources um and it's a it's a good euro game and that i think that's it's got like a little bidding part to it too so it's you know it's like hey people need to see how how much you're willing to spend on something and uh get a reward for it it's kind of interesting how they pulled that off yeah so you're budgeting and you're kind of thinking ahead about and you can't be too impulsive in those games where you're going to spend a whole lot of money on one thing and then not have anything left for the next and the cool thing that's simple about it is is like one board is really just like trying to build a pattern of four on this like landscape so you got that part right there that's like a little tile thing you got your worker placement where you'll go out and you'll put your you know put your workers in certain spots and stack them i think you stack them on top of each other to get more resources and then you got this part you have to kind of like bid your people to get this other stuff and i just find that like this feels like this is the perfect gateway to like real euro games because it covers everything uh more so than a splendor-like game you know like although splendor is great for that you know of picking things up and turning them in for something um but yeah i i just thought that on the fly i was like oh man montana is great for that um you can you can always hide gameplay under the veil of of game

12:23 of course like this you can i mean so it looks so you can always hide actual science in a game right you know brain games period periodic literally is you're just learning how to fulfill cars but you use it while sliding across a periodic table you know like um so you're just looking at and honestly like you don't have to be a scientist to even enjoy this game it's really just you know moving around the periodic table to understand how how that stuff moves by making choices of your own it's not that it's not something where i have to say hey you you as a parent have to be responsible for the periodic table you know it's really still like how do you map out and make your choices and slide it around and things like that it's it's not this is actually unlike their other games which are very good blends of science and things like that this one is just actually more like a sort of standard hero game in a sense and so it just happens to have a periodic table as the word that you're playing on right but it but uh you know overall though their games do a great job and if that's something your child is interested in it's really a good way to spark their mind they have an ion deck building game they get virulence they have all kinds of stuff where they kind of venture you know into some deep science because those people are actual scientists and doctors and science so they they know what the heck they're talking about they even have stuff in the book to kind of go deeper into it

13:54 so it's really how deep do you want to delve in it i i just ordered a game called pathnogenesis trust me it's a deck building game you know and it's even got an std expansion like it goes all the way in on this thing you know how deep do you want to go into the theme but don't forget always start in the beginning basic principles don't dig too deep embrace the simple fun of a abstract game like there's nothing wrong with playing blockus and you know and teaching people spatial recognition you know and it or you can buy a cottage garden you know or you can buy a cottage garden or spring isle of cats is another one oh my gosh so we can just write off of that and just say i don't know what that was but okay because i can ramble but we can like let's just even talk about that like kid adaptive stuff now you can take a lot of games and take rules completely out and still have a great experience with a child you know because maybe you eventually want them to be comfortable with that game but isle of cats does one better it actually is built to teach you the game uh and that's why i love that game to me that game is perfection it is literally perfection because it it it it works at every level and it it can take you whatever's in that box can take you through every level of it you can just say hey we're

15:24 just going to lay tiles and fill in space um hey we're going to play towels we don't even have to trap cars we can just take the cars we have in our hand you know and we can just play it out and you know play our cars and whoever gets what points wins and then you can actually play the game you know and it's like you can you can do all of them and all of them feel right and i like that that's a great family experience you know um and it's a good way to teach games to someone i think that and that's so important because parents are often intimidated by the rules for the game or if it's too complicated or too much you know a lot of the parents i d that i work with are familiar with the old like you said the parker brothers or you know the monopoly or risk and that's the extent maybe they play chess and so they know some of the more abstract ones but yeah that's the extent of your knowledge then a box like mage knight is going to be like you know pretty challenging and i don't know that's the thing i don't want what i don't want is for people to feel like they have to go too deep into games like i just i don't want people to go too deep you know i want kids to play deck builders before any other like a lot of games like i rather than play deck builders because they get you know they get amount amount to spend on this round and when they attack or they defend it's less iconography it's short reading

16:55 um really short hand reading there's not a lot of like there's usually not a lot of ambiguity in what you're reading it's like hey if you played this type of card then you get to add plus one to this oh okay and red is attack and blue is bi and or blue is magic or you just turn this card and i always have that magic you know like very easy process so they understand and as they build this synergy in their deck they're very it's gonna and ignite something that i think we we grow up to love and that's that payoff over and over again we get the yeah and i feel like when kids feel that that's what gets them really excited like for us it's like oh that's cool you know like this engine's pretty cool but like for them that's like oh i'm doing something oh you know i get this i get that i get this i get that and i watch my son do that with gizmos and oh man did i have a good video of that one where he was playing gizmos by the way one of the best games you can play there's another one you're teaching me so much today that one is a really good engine building game and it teaches you how to create an engine literally like i mean it will teach you how to like put cards away for research so you can hold them it teaches you how to build a kind of like a program so you're kind of like making these cars that have a program to them that teaches you to pick from something uh put this here put this there and you can do this and kind of run it off and at one point he had a turn that took a full minute to figure out it's like a minute and a half to figure out he's

18:27 like i'm gonna put this here i'm gonna do this there did that and he's like did i do that right and i'm like you scored 30 points like shut up like but but that's a good feeling that's a feeling we all want you know that's what we all want yeah yeah and as as a parent we're really excited for our kids when they do that and then we get kind of mad at them because they're gonna beat us in the game right now yeah yeah i don't let them win i don't let them win so well same with me now my son's 17 now and just recently we're playing everedell and he pulled off this crazy combo in everdell um and and he was just like over the move excited he was able to show everybody up and i'm gonna win this game now no one can catch me that's a fantastic experience it's a fantastic moment for us though too it's like when you play a game and you watch some kids struggle with it or you watch even your sunstroke you're just like it's a matter of time brother it's a better time you know it's like you just have to crack that code right you just have to correct that or you just you you find the right game that kind of fits their appeal because you know we have the advantage of like this is not my type of game or this is my game you know we have the mental process to go like all right before i even get started i don't like deck builders you know before i even get started i don't really want to play a dexterity game whereas like your kid could like you know um you know like just play a game like likes dexterity games like they want to play you know um meeple circus and you don't want to play maple circus but because they like to play people's circus and they're really like good at it cool you know

20:00 whereas like you got to find something that's as a parent i feel like it's our job to find something that introduces them to it you can sharpen them through the rest but you have to find something that introduces them and gets them excited about the hobby so here's you see this one back here behind me this one uh new york slice yeah that is a perfect family game like it's literally you i don't have you played it before i haven't played that literally a perfect family game like i that game is never going anywhere it's never leaving my collection it's literally slices of pizza so let's say you're having people for pizza pizza you break out new york pieces slice like but the cool part about it is that kids can get into this too because it has a simple idea of like hey i have a certain amount of sixes certain amount of sevens tens and elevens you put these in the stack and you take them out and it says hey this is the pizza special for today that'll give you certain stuff but you take the the amount of pizza slices from the stack and you split them so you do i split you choose so kids can see this you know kind of like hey in a simple split shoes simple split choose choices and they see the weight of their choices because they don't have all the sixes they don't have all the you know and they see like they don't have it spread out and what i love about a game like that is it's the old school feeling of a game that you could play the whole night you know like certain games have that ability that one's the type of one that

21:30 you can play several times and now that you got everybody going you know now they want to play something else you know and and that's that's where you want to get your you know your family and your kids into the finding these comfortable weight games where you can teach them things they can develop their minds but they ultimately are having fun and you're right there with them having fun and like that game just just a standard fun game yeah you can play high school but not everybody can flick around you know like you know not everybody can flick you know so you know uh but what people can do is split and choose slices of pizza and while you're having pizza you know like you know or hey let's order pizza because we have to play a pizza slice you know inspires them to order the pizza but look i mean you said i think that's the most important thing right is because if you've got these things on the shelf and there's some things that appeal to the kids it's like a low bar to figure out something that you can do with your kids something that you could do together as a family which to me is the most important thing for development is just spending time together with people that you care about yeah and and being able to have fun and have your friends over and have fun with the parents so that you get to know your kids friends and they get to know you i think and and i think uh when you're playing these games just don't limit the conversation to games you know it's like even if you're the person that owns the games you get all the games like talk just talk you know like um you know i'm just gonna keep staying games like you're playing a game of reef reef doesn't have a lot of rules you know it's an easy game it's got

23:02 beautiful components so kids who are not even good at it they're so distracted by how awesome the components are you know you get to play with these big plastic blocks and i mean they're like old school kid toys like that you use them on when you're a baby you know so you know if even if they don't get the rules you're playing the parents playing your son's plan or daughter because they are into it you know and then this other kid is just drooling on the toys and here you are you're playing a game but you get an opportunity to talk and sit at the table and and and that's exactly what you want that's what board games are supposed to provide that energy and uh you know like reef is a good learning game as well managing your hands and also you know knowing when to release and spatially place these things down so you know and it has that multiplier in there as well too so like around that board so you know like low-key you know getting those skills in uh and i watched my son do it i was just like yeah see this is exactly where he's at i know where he's at now and and right away when he was multiplying all that stuff and he was five i was like yeah he's good he's like i got it dad i'm like whoa okay all right we're good so you know that's that's what you want at the table you want learning opportunities but above all fun should be easy you know it should be very easy and games that make it easy for everybody at the table like that one like reef like it wasn't i've been kind of raffle riff and awful they should be it should be very easy to have fun wow now you've told me about a lot of

24:32 awesome gaming moments with your son do you have a favorite gaming moment recently that you can think of this is what i'd love to ask everybody who comes on the show oh uh you know i'm just happy to have my game group back man you know uh seeing that seeing the folks around the table um you know we've only i only had two people over so you know trying to beat social justice as much as possible and yeah it's just good to hear them catching up with your friends they got a life you know like they got a life outside of board games what have they been playing with their family you know that kind of stuff and just a different conversation that you have than every week you know because you've seen each other last week you know or you seen each other three days ago you know now it's like hey how you doing and those conversations need to be had as well so you know maybe if you're inviting one piece of actual advice that i would like to give everybody out here in your audience and across the world is you know make sure you know get to know you people that are in your game group a little bit more than just gaming you know or use that as a bridge to say hey how you doing you know because i you know i failed to do that with several of my you know people in my group and now you know i want to get to know what you know we'll know what's on their mind and find out more about them and gaming as well you know because we've been apart a lot of them especially now so yeah you know i miss them but i also want to know what they were doing and how they're doing and things like that so take that opportunity

26:03 yeah that's that's perfect now okay i gotta thank you for coming on and for joining me today i know you've been busy and there's a lot of things happening uh in your life if if people who are watching this wanted to find you or find your stuff where would they look oh well most if not all of my content will be on man versus meeple uh it's a lot it's a video review preview all kinds of stuff content coverage of board games um you can find that you know man versus me on youtube a lot of my content is going to be on facebook on the youtubes on the man versus meeple side and i do a lot of community buildings so you'll kind of see me a little bit everywhere um promoting games and things like that in your facebook groups such as like board game revolution the board game group solo board gamers morgan spotlight because i do do a lot of promotions of games as well but yeah just just a little bit everywhere if you like board games try to find me i'm like waldo not really

27:13 but yeah if you want to see me those are the outlets that at least you can find me on and yeah i like to give suggestions if you pm me you might get a response pretty quickly because sometimes i just like to help people out so i always want to help people out find them good games awesome thanks again for coming on oh man thank you for having me man so thanks to jeremy for joining me on brains on games and as he said you can find him online in just about any group that's all about board games he's all over the facebook board game groups for sure that's how i got in touch with them if you have a suggestion or a question for me you can find me at brian at brainsongames.ca brainsongames.ca is the website and brains on games is the twitter handle and the instagram feed and the facebook page and if you like this episode and you'd like to be notified when future episodes get posted you can head on over to youtube and hit that subscribe button thanks for joining me and hopefully i'll see you next time you