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…
The instinct to build massive edifices, monuments, and works of art is primal. For animals like the Bowerbird, their elaborate mating parlors are practical. For humans like Jason Blake, their mind-boggling creations eschew practicality for ambition. The most honest assessment I can give of Cysmic is that it’s a boldly crafted reliquary to youthful mirth…
Barbarian Kingdoms is the kind of modest board game that comes in a standard sized box with a small selection of cards, a reasonable number of tokens, and a surprising absence of miniatures. While it is nearly two years old at this point, it actually appears more long in the tooth and weathered. I wouldn’t…
Five months have passed since my original review of The Old King’s Crown. While the outside has grown colder and darker with winter, the inside is a different story. My appreciation for Pablo Clark’s ambitious game of throne-seeking has ignited. It’s stuck with me, claiming a seat in my top 10 of the year and…
The Old King’s Crown is beautiful. It’s a lavishly illustrated craft with peerless style. This charisma reverberates in the game’s excellent writing, with passages leaping from the page in order to set the scene of a King Lear-like situation with a vacant throne. Expectedly, the gears of the work are likewise dashing, powering the entity…
Cyclades‘ release in 2009 was a watershed moment. Alongside Chaos in the Old World, it was responsible for the conception of the hybrid design, blending together elements of Ameritrash and classic Euro principles. The hybrid movement is one of the most important developments in modern board gaming. It irrefutably influenced the hobby, resulting in contemporary…
I’m all about high falutin experiences that treat games as Art, but sometimes I just want to punch a cretin in the mouth and send chiclets flying. This is the hard knock life that Aldarra comes from. You might not know it by the Elvish sounding name or the pastoral cover, but this honkin’ beast…
Bloodstones is the antithesis of modern production. Instead of heaps of miniatures, it has stacks of oblong tiles. Rather than thick mounted boards, it has silky cloth maps. Instead of vacuformed inserts and trays, it has soft bags emblazoned with faction symbols. Instead of an air of disposability, this Martin Wallace creation feels like an…
The Last Kingdom is a Netflix series that found modest success across its five seasons. Based on a collection of novels from Bernard Cornwell called The Saxon Stories, this historical drama follows Uhtred of Bebbanburg, an enigmatic and ambitious warrior who was born a Saxon but raised by Vikings. It emerged in a cluttered historical…
Robotech means nothing to me. Maybe less than nothing as the general anime aesthetic is not something I find appealing. Thus, I can’t speak to how well Robotech: Reconstruction captures its intellectual property or evokes themes therein, but I do know a little something about GMT’s COIN (COunter INsurgency) series, enough to identify the throughline…
Player Elimination 