My relationship with Martin Wallace is shaky. His designs tend to be sophisticated works of deft subtlety, consistently marred by a single flaw or maladroit quality which undermines the whole. Take A Few Acres of Snow; this was a wonderful meld of deck-building and war-game set in one of the most interesting conflicts of North…
Sparks! Slontze! Toss in maybe a quote or two from the book series and this is how we begin. Or at least that’s how I’m supposed to begin. As an old man from another beloved IP said, “this isn’t going to go how you think.” The Reckoners, that is the board game, is getting incredible…
It’s Gen Con, 2015, and I’m moseying around a small room. This particular small room is in the back of a beaming restaurant. It’s a private Asmodee press event where they showcase demos of upcoming releases to members of the media. I don’t know any of these people. I feel out of place and small.…
Everyone is tense. Somewhere in the building a bomb is about go off. Lenny is a cop, but he’s no ordinary 5-0. He’s a badass with a 12-gauge and hair that’s as out of control as the era. He’s the star of our impromptu little film. The rest of us are hostages. When those bad…
It’s earlier this past summer. I have a moment and something gets lodged in my skull. This is a common enough occurrence, but today we’re talking about a particular moment. Dune. Yes, that game many still talk about from that group of designers who created one of the best games ever crafted – Cosmic Fucking Encounter. But…
And I thought writing about Root was difficult. Yellow & Yangtze is the sequel to Tigris & Euphrates no one asked for. When Grail Games announced this peculiar title, I cocked my head and sort of mumbled to myself. Yeah, that happens frequently enough, but here it was with purpose. Reviewing a game can be…
It’s not a stretch to refer to the current board game era as a narrative renaissance. We’ve seen a groundswell of story-first designs including Time Stories, Legacy of Dragonholt, and excellent new printings of the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series. Hell, I recently played the cardboard take on Big Trouble in Little China and even…
Some nights I struggle with feeding the machine. Some nights I look at the calendar and spend a whole 10 minutes worrying what I’m going to write about for Monday. Some nights I spend too much time listening to Fun and you get paragraphs like this. Of course I’ve been playing and writing, playing and…
When I heard Tiefe Taschen was getting a North American release, I literally fist pumped. It was a Tyson-esque thrust into the air that would have knocked a sucker clean out. This is a big deal. Fabian Zimmermann created a spectacular design that deserves wider recognition. It was finally coming. Then I heard it would be called…
It’s time to fess up: until recently, I had never played a Ryan Laukat release. I know, I can feel your gasp reverberating through my keyboard. I’ve rectified that with both the largely hyped Near and Far and the lesser aggrandized Empires of the Void II. The former is for another day, but let’s take more than a…
Player Elimination 