The Everything Tabletop Games Book: From Settlers of Catan to Pandemic, Find Out Which Games to Choose, How to Play, and the Best Ways to Win! (Everything® Series) Paperback – July 16, 2019

Bebo has produced some of the best game videos for several years. They are always well written, informative, and entertaining. Now she has done the same thing in book form. It's well formatted with gorgeous pictures. Her descriptions of the games are clearly written and provide an insight that only someone who has a love of games can provide. Each chapter highlights a different category of games and provides many examples that can help you decide which game to try next. If you love tabletop games, I strongly recommend this book. If you are looking for a gift for someone who loves games, this would be a great choice.

An invaluable resource for the librarian looking to build their games collection!I really wish I had learned about this book before my for my boardgame presentation at Georgia Library Conference because it is exactly the resource that everyone was asking for. The descriptions of gameplay for each game are excellent but I really appreciate how quickly one can find age recommendations, player numbers, playing time, difficulty, and objectives. All important information for a librarian deciding what would be the best game for their patrons.I'm blown away and so thankful for the hard work and research that Bebo put into this book. It's such a brilliant resource for gaming and it going to make the work I want to do in the library so much easier.I heartily recommend this book to everyone, librarians and gamers alike.

Bebo has been a powerful force in the board gaming scene for a number of years and her instructional videos give great, quick insights into the newest titles. This book does a similar thing, but in print. Each chapter highlights a particular style of hobby boardgames and fills it with a couple or three pages on notable examples of relevant titles. If you're new to the hobby, it is an excellent guide to what's going on out there, especially valuable if you don't have an easily accessible local game shop. Our house has been down the rabbit hole for some time, so for us, it's a nice Sunday afternoon or bedtime read that can introduce us to a game we missed or remind us of one we loved but have forgotten. We cannot recommend Bebo or her work highly enough.

Looking at the cover, you might think this will be a gorgeous, fully-illustrated book about modern board games. Sadly, it’s a fraction as illustrated as it should have been.The book cover says it includes “more than 100 of today’s most popular tabletop games” which is odd since there are only exactly 100 game chapters. Maybe they’re giving themselves credit for listing expansion modules that are available? That’s a bit of a cheat. There are only 100 games reviewed here.Of the 100 games, only about a third of them have large accompanying art. And some of the art that is shown is rather abstract (a close-up of a corner of the game board instead of the entire game board). This makes it all the more frustrating when the author describes games as “gorgeously illustrated” with “beautifully illustrated cards,” or a “beautiful” board with “stunning artwork.” One of the primary factors customers use to decide whether to buy a game or not is WHAT DOES THE GAME ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE? This book, sadly, doesn’t show you. (The author’s name is listed as “Bebo” which is presumably a pseudonym, which begs the question why she’s trying to keep her identity a secret? Is she embarrassed by the lack of visuals in her book?)Each chapter starts by stating the game’s Goal, often with unnecessary exclamation points, like “Be the player that has the most victory points!” Or, “Earn 15 points and you win the game!” Or, “The player with the most points at the end of the game wins!” The exuberance is a bit much, and is applied inconsistently, since other chapters will state the goal as “Be the player with the most victory points.” with no exclamation point.When attempting to describe the gameplay of these 100 games, the author sometimes goes into a little too much rules detail, which – due to the lack of any accompanying artwork – is less than helpful. The five sentences in this next paragraph should give you an idea of how confusing it can be trying to understand rules without any accompanying art:“Every card placed to the right of the far-left card costs one additional spice of any kind, and they are placed on the card passed by; the players who take those cards in the future also gain any spices on top of the card they are taking.”/“When a player goes to take a card from the center, she may only take one unless she trades them for the camels in her herd, keeping in mind that the next player then likely has access to a whole lot of camals he can take and use later.”/“If players get stuck in a doorway they may not eat the fish, however they can move their penguin to the red line on either door; if a player jumps over a doorway he cannot collect his fish above the doorway.”/“Then they check the wind movement and spend one of these leaves on their turn in order to place leaves in lines emanating from trees of their choice.”/“Then he chooses an orthogonal pathway from the select tile of the same length as the number of meeples he has, dropping one meeple in each space; his final meeple must be placed on a tile that already has that color of meeple.”The book has large margins with lots of empty space. Instead of filling this space with art, some pages have “Fact” sidebars that can be quite flippant. For example, one designer “prides himself on being able to quickly drop bad ideas and move on to newer ones in order to design better games more quickly.” (I wonder how other game designers felt when they read this quote? Do no other game designers do that?) Or the designer who thought of a game idea in bed one night and “the next morning he designed the prototype for the game!” (Surely other game designers have done this as well?) As you can see, the sidebars can also end with unnecessary exclamation points as well.There is also an attempt to categorize each game by “when” it should be played (like “When you’re at a dinner party” or “When you’re at the local game store” or “When you’re at a gaming convention”). These sidebars come across as even more filler material to make up for the lack of illustrations, never mind the fact that the lists aren’t always accurate. For example, in the chapter on “Cooperative Games” most of them are categorized as “When you want to play on a team” but some of the team games in that chapter are not listed that way, for some strange reason.As a book to help you decide if you want to buy a certain game, it functions well enough I suppose, but so would reading game reviews on Amazon, and using Amazon’s “You Might Also Like” and “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed” features. As a gift idea for a game enthusiast, I would not recommend this book but would instead recommend the Tabletop Gaming Manual by Matt Thrower over this one. While his doesn’t go into detail on specific games, his book is fully and fantastically illustrated and provides a much better overview of the board games hobby in general.

I'm just starting this book, and so far in chapter 2 there are all sorts of warning signs: the write up for Ticket to Ride uses the phrase "train cards" to refer to 3 different things (train cards, destination cards, and train cars), and the write up for Carcassonne gets the rules wrong, stating that points for cities and fields must be "divided" or "split" when more than 1 player has the same number of Meeples in the scoring area (this is incorrect - all players score the total value in this situation). So now I don't trust anything the book says about games I don't know.I have now read further, and the book incorrectly states the rules for more games, such as Dominion (Goal: be the player with the most victory cards in your hand at the end of the game; you actually want the most points, not the most cards) and Kingdomino (stating that the dominos are number side up when you select them; they are not - they are placed in numerical order in the selection queue, but flipped terrain side up before any are selected).Skip this book. It might have an interesting selection of games, but pretty much nothing written about those games can be trusted. This book seriously needed to be copy-edited by someone who knows the rules to the games. Way too many errors made it to print.