Boardgames To Go 225A - Mark Madness 2024 (with Patrick Pence)

Please join us on the Boardgames To Go discord server where you can chat online with other podcast listeners.

Play along and predict the winners at https://challonge.com/3abpsej6
Predictions must be submitted by March 12 to be in the contest

Mark Johnson

@MarkEJohnson

Patrick Pence

@Farsol

Last year I ran my first "March Madness" style, 64-game, single-elimination vote, with a contest to submit predictions for the entire bracket. If you've got a pool for the famous college basketball tournament in your office, or with your friends, then you know what this is. Actually, these days many other copycat tournament prediction contests exists--there's a big one on BoardGameGeek, my favorite movie podcast (Filmspotting) does one for films, and so on.

My version is similar, but it lists a bunch of games to be voted on against each other. Listeners suggested I call it Mark Madness, and that's what we did. Last year I picked all 64 games that we voted on, pulling from recent award winners in different categories. Listener Patrick Pence ended up the winner of the contest, and for that reason he's my co-host this month for the 2024 Mark Madness. Not only that, more listeners on our Discord channel suggested that the contest be more specific to me, asking me to populate the bracket with games that mean something to me. I did about half of those, and asked Patrick to do the same. Then I combined our lists, added a few "people's choice" titles to round it out, and then set up the bracket.

Play along! I hope we get a good number of folks who submit their own official predictions at challonge.com, which is free. Some have already done it. You've until March 12 to submit your brackets, so you need to move quickly. Then the voting rounds will start via Geeklist polling. As you can see from the chart above, the successive rounds of this voting will start happening every three days: On March 15 we'll have the results of the first round, when 64 teams are winnowed down to 32 survivors. Then it proceeds to the Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final 4, and Championship. Who will be the winner?

We expect to do "micro-episode" podcasts throughout the month to talk about each round. They'll show up in your regular feed, and I can link them here, too.

-Mark