Tom Vasel wants indie designers to stop guilt tripping him

Critics are due their moments of solipsism, but professionality dictates they happen beyond the keyboard and camera. Unfortunately, we live in the same reality as social media and thus watch as well meaning pundits cling to perceived criticism instead of taking it on the chin. That must be the impetus behind a recent video from The Dice Tower, titled I Don’t Care About Your Indie Game, where board game reviewer Tom Vasel ostensibly explains why his YouTube channel doesn’t cover more small press titles.

I say ostensibly because the video’s 12-minute runtime shows Vasel slide from reasonable complaints with creating online content to soapbox fist-shaking at anyone who would dare brandish the term “indie”, which he believes is “usually used as a guilt trip or a surprise.” As best I can tell, the video is a response to a strain of public comment alleging that The Dice Tower ignores smaller games. The first half attempts to define Vasel and Co’s rubric for the channel’s frankly industrious output: art style, interesting themes, who published the game, designer pedigree, and yes, even general popularity. 

One item sits on Vasel’s list of factors that The Dice Tower doesn’t consider: publisher size. 

It’s clear that the term “indie” has been stuck in Vasel’s craw for years. He’s been at this for decades now, and The Dice Tower is probably second only to Shut Up & Sit Down in hobby prevalence and important YouTube metrics. He spends the rest of the video deflecting the blades of supposed critics who believe small press games deserve coverage on merits of size alone. He argues for a version of fairness, of objectivity and meritocracy, because the tabletop industry is a nation of tiny voices living in the shadow of Hasbro, Mattel, Ravensburger, and Asmodee. In his own words: “Who’s not an indie publisher?”

We’re not above a good round of inside baseball here at Rascal, and we’ve even attempted to chide elements of our own industry slice over their assumed relationship to journalists. But there’s something dismissive about The Dice Tower’s posture that rubs the wrong way. One Bluesky comment from Daniel Wynter described the video’s tone as “deeply incurious and unnecessarily cruel,” and I find it difficult to argue otherwise. Thomas, I’m curious about what struck you most about The Dice Tower’s tiny treatise on using ‘indie’ as a cudgel against poor, beleaguered content creators.