Talk Cardboard

Yes, this is the very last episode of Talk Cardboard. But there is a sort of continuation. More on that in the episode itself.

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On to the timestamps!

5:33 The Queen's Dilemma
14:32 Oath
16:03 Torchlit
19:40 Hanami
24:30 Sovereign: Fall of Wormwood
29:37 Strange Slot Simulator
34:26 Container
39:15 Foxglove Farm
42:46 The Old King's Crown
44:46 Typeset

Just for reference, the population of Klaipėda, the third largest city in Lithuania is approximately 161 000 people. The number of attendees in this year's Spiel Essen was 220 000 people, meaning they managed to cram the entirey of Klaipėda and much more into just eight convention halls and every one of those people were buying board games.

I appreciate that that is maybe not everybody's jam, and aspects of it are not our jam either. But getting our mitts into a jar of Bonne Maman filled with gooey new board game releases - put a bib on me and fire up the toaster!

In this special joint episode of No Pun Included and Talk Cardboard we cover 16 new releases from Spiel Essen 2025, which you can either listen to here or partake in the video version https://youtu.be/NHVLn-ZxVWs

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On to the timestamps:

0:00 Cold Open
2:46 Intro
5:42 Night Soil (Unranked)
9:11 Bouba Kiki
14:14 Nocturnis
17:56 Formidable Farm/Formidabel!
22:00 Tax the Rich
27:44 Echoes of Time
36:30 Fearless
41:30 National Economy
48:23 Thesauros
1:00:34 biD Coin
1:07:20 Kikai/Bricolage Heads
1:16:46 Tag Team
1:26:59 Recall
1:36:14 ???
1:56:10 ??
2:03:33 ?
2:14:53 Outro

Spinning pandas, evolving primates, and... Capitalism! We have all three for you in this episode - thankfully not all in the same game.
We could have had three games about mammals, but we didn't think this through. 

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Onto the timestamps:

00:00 Cold open
02:09 Intro
03:45 Panda Spin
18:34 Primates
32:51 Tycoon: India 1981
48:25 Correspondence

Only three games this episode? What gives? Well, in the tried and true brand tradition, we decided to go back to our original formula. But no sad trombone noises please - we're really, definitely, honestly going to make it work this time...

On this episode, we have Identity - a trick taking game that promises personality, Out of Sorts - a game of inventing a cataloguing system for books in an alien library, and Magical Athlete - a game of racing a banana, a giant baby, and various other quirky things round a track.

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On to the timestamps:

00:00 Cold open & intro
05:50 Identity
14:16 Out of Sorts
28:57 Magical Athlete
42:03 Correspondence

There are episodes where we bring as much knowledge as we can about whatever board game we are talking about. And then there are episodes where we just want to share why something didn't click so much that we didn't want to go beyond game one. Apropos of nothing, today we'll be chatting about Brink, a "trading cubes in space" game that conceptually riffs on Catan but in execution whiffs on us.

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On to the time stamps:

00:00 Cold Open & Intro

Work in Progress: 

2:08 Tenby

7:26 Railroad Tiles

10:42 Rumble Nation

18:53 Winter Rabbit

Audience Correspondence:

25:05 Vantage, Neurodivergence in Board Games

Main Feature:

31:23 Brink