You can pinpoint moments where things change, where ripples meet ripples and creativity shifts. Dominion concocted deckbuilding. Love Letter gave the microgame sex appeal. The Crew pulled trick-takers from the ground like a necromancer. Now, Balatro is whispering in the minds of designers, calling forth Ace of Spades, Rolling Deep, and the subject of this…
Kasper Lapp, Voight-Kampff test, 10-minute social deduction game is the kind of pitch I hope to hear when riding the elevator. Lapp previously designed quirky hits like Magic Maze and That’s Not a Hat, so his brand of silly seems uniquely appropriate for this sort of nonsense. When it works the playful interrogation is both…
You’re stuck in a foreign place. It’s a prison of walls and darkness and fear manifest. Do you trust the unknown formless hand? Do you expose your vulnerability for a glimpse of truth? Do you recoil or do you meet The Presence? The Presence is a ghost story. It’s an indie work that draws obvious…
This review is based on a pre-production copy of the game that is expected to be nearly identical to the final product. I love MOBA games. My time playing League of Legends and DOTA are well in the rearview, but many of these games’ concepts work extraordinarily well on the table. Team play. Miniatures skirmish-like…
Releasing an album that consists entirely of cover songs is a risky proposition. For every Renegades of Funk there’s also a Thank You. IV Studio’s Realm of Reckoning is such a perilous venture, excising slices of ingenuity from some of the area control genre’s most prolific entities. The originality and expression exist in how these…
Tag Team was a noteworthy competitor in 2025. Its combination of smooth card play with the unpredictable drama of auto-battling forms a compelling build. So compelling in fact, that it seized my affection previously allocated to games like Unmatched and Dice Throne. Anyone with eyes could see this new Scorpion Masqué title was not a one-off.…
After a decade of work, Jenna Felli continues to evolve and shirk a single design style. One continuing trait that has stuck around since her origin is an embracement of the bizarre. But even that is possibly on the chopping block. From Shadows of Malice to Zimby Mojo to Cosmic Frog, I’d dare to say,…
Y’all know the difference between a bilge rat and a man-eater? I’m talking ’bout the bad fish. One that will swallow you whole. Roll you ’round in its jaws and squeeze the life out a ya. This cutter, in the year of our lord 2019, was a fierce gnawer. Still is! She’s among the best…
War is morally questionable, at best a compromise between inaction and horrific aggression. The societal and human costs are often extreme. There are benefits, however. Achieving independence. Ending tyranny. Freeing an enslaved population. Often, violence is the only remaining option. Rapid technological advancement is another benefit. One typically overlooked due to its insignificance in contrast…
Whenever people liberally throw around words like “innovative” or “unique” with recently published games, I can’t help but clench my jaw. It’s a difficult pothole to avoid, as the promises spat by titles in the crowdfunding era are necessarily braggadocios. We’re all guilty of this from time to time. It’s natural to pile on superlatives…
Player Elimination 