The longest Hobbycast, and the most revealing. Daniel (@dungeondive) takes questions from Patreon and the Facebook group, and the answers sketch a whole hobby biography: three phases, 1984-1999 (D&D, Talisman, Palladium, ending in collectible cards he gave away and now estimates at tens of thousands of dollars), 2004-2009 (a deliberately broad collection built around Fantasy Flight), and the narrow, focused Dungeon Dive era from 2014.
Several threads recur. Shelf space is the real curator — big boxes go first, whatever their merit. On criticism, he’s frank about being friends with designers he’s reviewed harshly, and notes that both Roger Deering and Jerry Hawthorne took his complaints into later work. On his own design: three zines, print-on-demand, and never crowdfunded, because the obligation would stop him finishing. His advice to designers is to keep the vision narrow and ignore backers.
Also here: the origin of the channel as “a digital museum” for games nobody was covering in depth; five albums of 2022; house rules for Talisman, Folklore and HEXplore It; five games he’d rescue from a fire; regret at not splitting books and games into separate channels; and Gonzo, nominated as the Muppet most likely to succeed as an assassin.
Is a critic’s honesty easier or harder to sustain once the designers are people you talk to?