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Cult of the Old - Lords of Vegas

Season 4 · Episode 3

Monday, August 10, 2026 • Duration 01:11:08

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

Let me take you back dear listeners. Way back. A time before gin joints, and speakeasies, when the saloon was king. The west keened a golden siren call to thousands of prospectors some struck it rich, others did not return, and America was forever changed. Although it was California that most flocked to, a little further east, and a century or two later, another place would become synonymous with the idea of striking it rich. Las Vegas, Nevada.

Las Vegas has become a mecca for those looking to make their fortune, but the house always wins. Although it would be interesting to go as far back as the Wild West to look at something like Poker, that is not the aim of my preamble today. Nor is it to look at any of the numerous parlour games become gamblers laments that have taken up residence in the glitzy casinos of Las Vegas. No today we look at a game that asks you to invest in Vegas before it was Vegas. To have the vision to construct strange churches to greed and avarice in the middle of the desert. To truly become Lords of Vegas.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mention during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Monopoly - Episode Link

Other Mentions

Mike Selinker accusations

Cheapass Gamestf

Fortress Ameritrash

Iain’s Lords of Vegas Americana Review

Team Links

Iain

Matt

Nate

Email us at cultoftheolduk@gmail.com

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Cult of the Old - Innovation

Season 4 · Episode 2

Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 01:01:26

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

Games can be many things. They can be journeys back in time, a window to nostalgia or a new and exciting arrangement of ideas. They can range in tone from light to dark. Climb in complexity from breezy to fiendishly complicated. They can be laden with components, stacked high with plastic, or they can be, like our next game, a deceptively simple set of cards.

This game is, by most people’s measure, a bit of an ugly mess of graphic design, but that hasn’t stopped it getting a cult following. Like many games we have covered over our first 3 seasons, it stamped its designer's name on the history of the hobby. Join us as we look at a game where every card makes you do a second take. It’s time for Innovation.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mention during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Cult of the Old - The Castles of Burgundy

Season 4 · Episode 1

Monday, June 29, 2026 • Duration 01:05:29

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

It’s the fourth season of Cult of the Old and we have a new 10 episode arc for you covering games, big and small, but all interesting.

We begin this season with a game that defined a genre, the point salad. A heady mix of random chance, manipulated fate, and multiple paths to glorious points heaven gave us one of the classics of the 2010s. It may be as dry as the desert, but it carved a path through the next couple of decades with remakes, upgrades, reissues, and spinoffs. Come and sip a glass of fine wine with us as we construct the Castles of Burgundy.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mention during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Battlestar Galactica - Episode Link

Nexus Ops

Cosmic Encounter - Episode Link

Puerto Rico -

Cult of the Old - Through the Ages

Season 3 · Episode 10

Monday, June 23, 2025 • Duration 01:07:04

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

Dear listeners, it is once again time for us to part ways. As we come to the end of our third season, let us reflect on the games we have covered. From the family friendly Ticket to Ride, to the genre defining titles like El Grande and Dominion, and the brutal chance of Blood Bowl we have covered a wide range of genre, mechanism, and complexity. However, no game this season has the reputation for sheer scale and difficulty of our final title.

Not only did our last title this season establish its designer as a powerful voice, but it took a venerable genre and turned it inside out. The civilisation style of board games is almost as old as the hobby, and our final title took this genre, stripped out a lot of the fundamentals and made a game that took the world by storm. Join us for one last time this season as we go Through the Ages.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mentions during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Pandemic

Mage Knight

Codenames

Francis Tresham Civilisation

Cult of the Old - Blood Bowl

Season 3 · Episode 9

Monday, June 9, 2025 • Duration 01:15:29

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

Nate: Well Iain we are almost at the end of the season

Iain: That’s right Nate and the teams have all to play for

N: Teams?

I: Yes Nate, teams. In no other sport do we get to see the sheer physicality and natural brutality brought out in such a glorious manner

N: This isn’t a sports podcast Iain, it’s a board game podcast

I: Can’t it be both?

N: I guess it could. If we covered a board game from at least 10 years ago that happens to be focused on sport

I: How about a fantasy sport?

N: Tell me more Iain

I: Well Nate, let me tell you about a sport that is not only an allegory for the animosity between many fantasy races but also stands as one of the icons of the British gaming scene.

N: Is it from a famous British Publisher?

I: You took the words right out of my mouth Nate

N: Meat Loaf?

I: No thanks I’ve eaten.

N: Enough of this, let’s get on with the show

You’re right Nate, let’s tell these fine folks about Blood Bowl.

Cult of the Old - Power Grid

Season 3 · Episode 8

Monday, May 26, 2025 • Duration 01:07:51

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

Sometimes you hear about games by reputation. The epic length of Twilight Imperium, the complexity of Vita Lacerda designs, the seemingly simple mechanisms behind the games of Reiner Knizia. These reputations can attract or repel in equal measure, and sometimes they are undeserved. The folklore around some games can be a hindrance to their uptake. However some folk tales are firmly based in reality.

The game we are covering tonight is one of those games that I knew by reputation alone. Dry, excruciating downtime, with very little in the way of redeeming features. Despite that description this is a game that has always been available, an evergreen in more ways than one. Now that I have played the game, what do I think? We will get to that. As to what my fellow hosts think, well they are in the ring and ready to fight over the classic that is Power Grid.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mention during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Ticket to Ride - Episode Link

Imperial

Railway Rivals

Cult of the Old - Memoir 44

Season 3 · Episode 7

Monday, May 12, 2025 • Duration 01:06:27

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

A large part of the culture of the tabletop hobby is tied up with games emulating history. From HG Wells’ Little Wars to the early days of Avalon Hill and the modern expressions of the form in GMT Games, wargames are undoubtedly a large part of tabletop gaming’s history and present. We have covered one of the icons of this genre with Twilight Struggle in Season 1, a game that sat atop the BGG rankings for many years.

Our next game this season has never had such an accolade, but has still been a massive presence over the years. Taking the more complicated wargames that were available at the time and distilling them into a fast card driven experience, it crossed the aisle into more mainstream hobby gaming. Soon it was on gamers shelves everywhere and spawned numerous, and we do mean numerous, expansions, campaign books and more. Pull up a chair and reminisce with us as we look back at Memoir 44.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mentions during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Twilight Struggle

Ticket to Ride

Battlecry

Cult of the Old - El Grande

Season 3 · Episode 6

Monday, April 28, 2025 • Duration 58:57

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

Over the last two and half seasons of Cult of the Old we have covered some absolute classics. From the brutal farming of Agricola that kicked off our very first season to Catan that began our second we have looked at games venerable and revered, and some that are just past their prime Some of those games still hold their place in the hobby, but many have been surpassed as designers take the original ideas and improve on them ten fold.

This is not the case for the game we are covering tonight.

Hitting the scene in 1995, the same year as Catan, our next title quickly became a watch word for area control. Though many games have followed in this Grand Dames footsteps, none have managed the combination of simple mechanisms, devilish decisions, and twists of fate that this title nailed. Pick up your caballeros and send them into the depths of the Castillo as we explore El Grande.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mentions during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Catan - Episode Link

Civilisation

Cult of the Old - Scrabble

Season 3 · Episode 5

Monday, April 14, 2025 • Duration 56:19

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

The three of us on this cast are purveyors of words. We use them to communicate our thoughts on games in the written or audio form. In doing so we hope to convey the emotions, feeling, and mechanisms behind games we love and loathe.

Words have a long history of association with games. From Victorian parlour games to modern expressions of the form in games like Codenames and Paperback Adventures. Of course here on Cult of the Old we are not interested in the modern expressions so much as the origins of word games.

We aren’t going to go back as far as the Victorians this episode. We are instead going to go back to the early 20th century. Then a game that was originally called Criss-Cross words was brought to a wider audience. It is then when it took on its modern name which you will already be familiar with. Scrabble.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mentions during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Codenames

Paperback Adventures

Kriegspiel

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Cult of the Old - Dixit

Season 3 · Episode 4

Monday, March 31, 2025 • Duration 01:00:08

Welcome to the latest episode of Cult of the Old!

Each episode your hosts Iain McAllister, Matt Thrower, and Nate Owens are going to turn back the clock to look at games that are at least 10 years old. They’ll give their own critical impressions, tell you about the history of the game and its impact, and what relevance these games still have in the modern hobby landscape.

Games come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. As consumers and critics of the form we try and categorise, quantify, and contemplate the flaws and virtues of these forms. We have tackled many games over the first two seasons of Cult of The Old from the heavier economic stylings of Brass, the negotiation heavy stylings of Cosmic Encounter, and the gentle , if grim, farming of Agricola. One category we haven’t touched on so far is that of the party game.

These games tend to take a large number of players and lie at the lighter end of the mechanical spectrum. Although not the originator of this style of game, the title we are covering today is arguably one of the most influential. Coming in a blockbuster year of titles it was the lightest of that crop to make a mark, and it didn’t really take off properly until a couple of years later. A game that allows the players to express themselves through art, interpretation and surreal imagery. Welcome to the dream world of Dixit.

Show Links

Below are links to the games and anything else that the team mention during the course of the cast. We will be linking to BGG for games, designers, artists, and publishers as that is a good place to start for raw information about the game in question.

Games Mentioned

Stella on BGA

Apples to Apples

Cards Against Humanity