35 Comments
May 9, 2022Liked by James Breakwell

Love this new newsletter format! Fun to be able to listen instead of reading.

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May 9, 2022Liked by James Breakwell

Always enjoy the chaos as it reigns supreme!! My house was very much like that with only 2! But honestly, looking back all we do is laugh and remember with joy. Okay, well, my daughter still says her big brother terrorized her, but we are getting closer to the joy :D

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May 9, 2022Liked by James Breakwell

I have three grandchildren 5,7 and 10. I look forward to sharing these stories with them. The actions and words are so familiar. The comments about the 11 year old sound so familiar

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Thanks a lot for the audio version!!!! I so enjoy your newsletter and books!!!! But don't always find the moment to read the newsletter... (one of the weird people who doesn't bring my phone to bed) so I got super excited of this audio version, now I can enjoy it while driving (and be safe😅) Thanks again for making parenting fun 🤗

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Have you seen https://boardgamearena.com/. They have wide range of games (including high strategy) and it isn't hard to find others waiting for some competition against people who you don't hear them cry when you win(or they don't hear you, when you lose). I pay for the annual membership (?20/year) which allows me to have a private table and invite my husband and 3 adult (in age only) girls to play. We enjoyed it quite a bit during COVID since we weren't all in the same house. My husband is a rule snob and must understand every nuance and play with the correct interruption of the rules. This lead us to playing Puerto Rico for 90 minutes, which sadly we didn't actually finish the game because my husband stopped us every 2 minutes to clarify a rule and my girls "had other obligations to get to", thank goodness. Needless to say, we have never played that game as a family again. That website has video tutorials and has wide range of difficulty and age range. When we try a new game, everyone watches the video tutorial at their own speed and then we play together, so then we only stop a handful of times to clarify the rules. When we buy a new game, my husband plays a few mock games against fake opponents so we never have a Puerto Rico fiasco again. We like Dice Forge and you can call us a loser family, but we have sat at our kitchen table (yep all 5 of us in the same house) with our computers in front of us, playing Dice Forge because the game play is much faster that way!! thankfully we are all smart, competitive people so we all enjoy and can successfully play high strategy games. Pitty the boyfriend who shows up, who isn't good at board games. Oh we already had one of those and thankfully they broke up! I mean he couldn't even grasp the basic strategy of one of our simplier games, what a nightmare it would have been to teach him Puerto Rico....oh and he really wasn't the right one for our daughter either!

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I would recommend the commodities trading game Pit for a very LOUD and fun family night. It was a favorite of all the grandkids at our weekend gathering for my mother's 80th birthday. We played it as teenagers with our grandmother when she stayed with us when my parents went away for my Dad's army reserve duty in the summer each year. One night she was laughing so hard tears ran down her face and I was genuinely worried we might lose her . . .

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Hi James, love the new format. As a long time foreign (British) fan, I feel a lot closer to the action than the words on the page tend to elicit. If i have a single critique, having heard you on videos on twitter before, relax! Comparably, the first-audio-newsletter-fear-of-4-kids-and-2-pigs-running-into-the-room-and-desecrating-the-recording fear is palpable.

Perhaps over time you'll (foolishly) develop faith in the sanctity of your privacy for 15 minutes on a Monday, or alternatively, like many of the things we hold dear in life, you'll simply eventually stop caring whether there's rogue squealing in the background of such recordings (child squeals? Pig squeals? Who cares, it's probably bad news either way).

Look forward to hearing more about the girls' tabletop gaming pursuits. I'm sure you'll have escalated at least Betsy to the hefty heights of Settlers by Halloween, which means she'll probably be beating you by Christmas. Such is the circle of life.

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I'm always given the designated task of learning the rules and explaining them to my family because they just want the fun part and none of the work but they always want to play new games!! We always spend multiple hours of quality time arguing and then they want to do it all again!

Loving the audio file!! Means i can now enjoy your newsletter and laugh on my walk to work instead of trying to squeeze in time to read during the week!

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Fun to hear your voice!

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Gloomhaven is a wonderful game - my hubby and I played through once together, reset it, and then played through with our 10 & 12 year olds. Strongly recommend getting the Gloomhaven helper app! It's a lifesaver. And yes, start with Jaws of the Lion, that will ease you into Gloomhaven!

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Absolutely brilliant and fun. This makes my day

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Love it! So relatable. My kids are adults now (30, 29, and our surprise baby 20) and we found a game we could all play (when the kids were young) and love even with an age gap ranging from Boomer (hubby), Gen X (me), 2 millennials, and a Gen Z. The Simpsons game. Not reading required, easy, entertaining, and funny. It has cards that they need to hold and that was the trickiest part of that game. We played it so much we wore the cards out. Great memories.

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Introduce your kids to Dueling Llamas

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Do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT try to play Jumanji with the kids. You mentioned howler monkeys….my game player kids are 11, 7, and 5. You can almost never “get out of the jungle” and you win or lose as a whole. Throughout the process, the die get thrown everywhere except the table with only 15 seconds to land on the correct item and the kids scream bloody murder and don’t even notice what item they have before trying again. We get “stuck” in the jungle and everyone is 😡🤬😢😶‍🌫️😱😭 until we play 10 more times and get out.

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I love the addition of the audio version! I almost exclusively listen to books now, so making myself physically stop to read an article once weekly takes a surprising amount of self discipline given that I'm used to being able to look away from my entertainment without losing the stream of content entering my brain. This is so much more convenient.

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I can tell you one hobby more expensive than board games is a serious comic book addiction. There are so many branches to it. Comics are piled (when they aren't boarded and bagged) knee deep in several parts of my house. Toys based on comics are worse. They are stacked to the ceiling. That's my house. Board games - we have a few, but they're older than your kids.

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