Base price: $12.
1+ players.
Play time: ~5 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 3

I bought some Button Shy games. It was ShyCon, I love Button Shy, and, you know, these things happen. More on these later, but I played a bunch of games over the weekend, so I’ve got a number of things to talk about! I actually … haven’t had a ton of time to play games in person for a while, so I’ve largely been playing on Board Game Arena. And, God willing, it looks to be that way until Gen Con. We will figure it out. Let’s talk about a Button Shy game, though! It’s Apropos: Of Board Games!

Like Apropos: Of Movies, Apropos: Of Board Games brings back the “Must Have” and “But No” categories to challenge your knowledge of tabletop gaming! This time around, you’ll play each round by naming a board game and then placing the next category card either in “Must Have” or “But No” so that the previously-named board game no longer fits. With a five-minute timer, you don’t have a lot of time to figure things out. But if you can successfully name five games, you win! How’s your board game vocabulary?

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, Apropos: Of Board Games is a lot of fun! I think this might be my new convention hit game, specifically for board game conventions with industry folks. It’s a fun way to wrack your brain for a complicated answer on a topic, though I will say that this is a much more niche topic than the movies one. We particularly found that “Single-Word Title” was the ongoing wrench in our gears when we would play, as applying that to any sufficiently-long game was enough to occasionally knock us out. I would say that this game seems extremely difficult to play with folks who don’t have a particularly deep knowledge of board games, though I’d say the same thing about Of Movies. It’s just more likely for a random person selected to have a working or passing knowledge of pop culture movies than it is for them to be knowledgable about board games. Maybe Dropout and Tabletop and such are changing that, but it’s still a pretty slow-going cultural shift (at least until everything is a superhero movie).

I did notice that Of Board Games and Of Movies both apparently have sequels coming this year, which is great, because the one thing that I would say both have in common (and is a Con from me) is that occasionally you can find that the game starts to get a little stale. With 18 cards and you choosing five per game, the chance of you seeing the same card or two across multiple games is … difficult to calculate (it might be something like 1 – 1/e? I’m truly not a math person). It’s not zero though, and seeing the same card a few times is kind of a bummer. We’ve definitely put a card back because we saw it across all three games we played in one session, for instance. Adding more cards will be a fun way to spice that up, but like many games, there is a shelf life for how many games you can likely play in one session. The easiest way to refresh though is to change the group or wait some time. Both make things work.

This is all to say that I’ve really enjoyed Apropos: Of Board Games! I like the system, I like how simple the game is, and I like that whenever a designer or content creator or publisher comes by and asks what we’re doing we can rope them in and bully them into trying to help us, regardless of whether or not it’s going to go well. That’s bullying I can get behind. I think this is a game that encourages that kind of drop-in, experiential play, and that’s a lot of fun, even if you lose. It’s the kind of game that makes you want to try again and hope that it ends better, and it’s the kind of game where everyone is sitting around clutching their head to try and wrack their brain for a game that’s based on a location and has meeples but not dice or cubes and definitely has an app (does Lost Ruins of Arnak count?). Plus, there’s plenty of room for harmless debate since you’re all on a team together; you can decide what’s legit. If you’re looking for a fun bit of trivia experience and you’re down to test your board game know-how, Apropos: Of Board Games is going to be right up your alley! Either way, I’m definitely a fan.

---

If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!