Friday Night Shots – Reviews vs First Impressions

It’s a Friday night and the rain has stopped!

Until overnight, then it’s supposed to rain all weekend.

Welcome to Vancouver!

Thanks for coming into the bar, even with the Canucks game on.

Sorry, I don’t have a TV. Just a jukebox that plays nothing but the greatest hits of Donny Osmond.

You’ll notice there’s nobody else in here?

Maybe I should get a TV.

But you’re not here to listen to “music” or talk about hockey.

You’re here to talk about board games!

So let me grab you a beverage of your choice and let’s get started.

Tonight, I’d like to talk about review posts and first impressions posts.

When I started this blog, oh those many years ago (into year 8 now!), I wanted to do game reviews, among other things.

And that’s what I did to start, with my first review actually being copied over from the Game Informer user blog where I had first posted it (and which is now gone, sadly).

I really enjoyed World’s Fair 1893 and wanted to talk about it.

I had played it enough that I felt comfortable doing a review of it.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for it, though I haven’t played it in years.

I still have it, though!

Anyway, there were a few reviews posted, and then I played a game that I didn’t think I would get more plays of but I really wanted to talk about it.

Custom Heroes is a card-crafting game from John D. Clair, and I bounced very heavily off of it.

Since I only played it the one time, I knew I couldn’t review it.

So I did a “First Impressions” post about it, noting right up front that this was not a review, but just my take after the first play.

I’ve only done nine First Impressions posts in the 7+ years of doing this blog, mainly of Early Access digital games where the game could change drastically so I didn’t want to make it a full review.

I even did a first impressions post about Modern Art, a Knizia auction game that I actually really liked and wanted to post about because I didn’t think I’d play it again.

I then ended up buying my own copy of it and playing it a bunch more, but I felt that doing a review would be superfluous because my first impressions hadn’t really changed.

Which is kind of the crux of my problem, and what I wanted to explore tonight.

What do you think of First Impressions posts in comparison with reviews?

I know that reviews are the most valuable because you get a deep delve into the game from somebody who knows it well enough to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the game.

(Editor: “I’ll try to stifle my laughter at that.”)

But do you find any value in first impressions?

There are a number of games that I’ve played and I’ve liked that I’ve only played once.

Hell, some of them are in my Top 50!

Some of them I doubt I’ll ever play again. They may be convention-only experiences and the circumstances just happened to be right.

I may want to play them again, but given the makeup of my play group, it’s unlikely.

(Or Abi may have traded it away before I could get a second play)

I’ve been thinking, mainly as my posting frequency has lulled a bit in the last few weeks, that I might like to do some first impressions posts of games that really intrigued me (or really turned me off) on my first play of them, if I know that I probably won’t be able to play them again.

Or if I do, not for a long while.

Of course, any game that I personally bought or traded for, I’m going to try to play enough to review (if I play it at all), but I’m talking about games brought by my friends or maybe played at conventions.

Let’s take, for example, Quantum, which I played at OrcaCon thanks to my friend Sean from Thing 12 Games.

I played that the one time. Nobody I know owns it and I doubt it will come to the table in front of me again.

Could I do a first impressions post of that, and would it be interesting to you, the reader?

This is just an example, as it didn’t make a large enough impression on me to want to write about it anyway.

But could I?

Do I want another instance of what happened with Modern Art, though, where I do end up playing it a bunch of times and my only recorded thoughts of it are in the first impressions post?

I don’t really want to write a review of something that I’ve done a first impressions post on when my thoughts really haven’t changed.

It would consist of “cool, I’ve played this more now, and everything I said previously stands.”

If my thoughts have changed, though, watch out!

This could have happened with Underwater Cities, as I was so impressed with my first two plays of it that I was kind of itching to write about it.

I never did, and that’s a good thing because I played it again a couple years later and now I have a review for it.

Some would suggest just deleting the first impressions post and doing a review, but I don’t really like to do that.

If I wrote something, I want there to be a record of it out there.

Even if it’s a news post that’s now 5 years out of date and will never be looked at again.

Ok, maybe I should rethink that…

But anyway, I want to get more posts done, and first impressions can be a good way to do that.

Not if nobody’s interested in them, though.

So I put it out to you, the reader.

Do you find any value in first impressions posts?

They would, of course, clearly state that it was written after only one play so opinions can change, yadda yadda yadda.

I’ll just sit back now and watch the replies pour in.

Tonight’s post brought to you Crown Royal whiskey, the number 43, and the letters U and C