The Hunters is a big game. It unfolds across the table with swollen cardboard limbs. It spits hundreds of cards in all directions, cards to represent locations, enemies, and story. No speck of surface is left unsoiled. In fact, you may not even be able to fit it all on your table. Such is life…
Core Space just gets me. It does so much of what I want from a miniatures game. A restrained yet satisfying ruleset that is easy to recall even with months between sessions. A free form and light campaign system which can be engaged on my own terms. An interesting and characterful setting that remains vague…
Godtear is not what I expected. It’s tighter and more succinct than the standard Steamforged Games release. The ruleset is very clean and sensible, surprisingly so. Better yet, it manages to avoid any native sense of sterility that is common in stripped down conflict-oriented designs. All things told, this is a fantastic work. Before I…
Uncertainty dominates our lives. Events continue to be postponed or canceled. Kickstarter delivery dates have shifted from optimistic white lies to blatant punch lines. My preferred grocer hasn’t restocked frozen broccoli in three months. But there has been one constant; that is the quality of Restoration Games’ Unmatched. This system, comprised of many standalone sets,…
Games Workshop’s Dungeon Bowl is frivolous and incoherent in the best of ways. This subterranean take on Blood Bowl was originally released in 1989 and returns this year with a deluxe boxset. It’s an over-the-top zany thing where randomness trumps strategy. Each play unfolds as a silly story with weirdos reliving the glory days of…
There is a complex logos at work in Triton Noir’s Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood of Venice. The elaboration is not found in the fairly lean ruleset, an evolution of the stealth mechanisms found in the sublime V-Sabotage (formerly V-Commandos), rather, it’s embedded in the larger arrangement of expansive content and its tenuous relationship with physical capacity.…
OverDrive is a new kind of sports game that is best described as the flow of Dreadball with the format of TimeSplitters 2 and the showmanship of the WWE. Perhaps that makes sense and your attention is secured. Maybe it doesn’t and I may as well be speaking whatever language the big shark-man on the…
Descent has been a constant in the hobby since 2005. Its lineage stretches back even farther, as it functionally carries the torch for 1989’s Heroquest. It’s a comfortable reassurance that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Not anymore. Some view Legends of the Dark as a harbinger of doom. This is…
A couple of years ago I was driving through Memphis and I had the radio cranked to a level of volume best described as distortion. I was listening to a classic rock station; timeless cuts like “Fortunate Son” and “Jessie’s Girl”. The car was bumping. Then something strange happened. “Seven Nation Army” by The White…
It’s easy to dismiss Ruination. Its another one of those games with dudes walking across a map so they can battle other dudes, petroleum leaking from broken plastic bodies as slaughter begets slaughter. But this one takes place in the post-apocalypse. Or rather the post-post-apocalypse as the primary mode of transportation is foot and hoof.…
Player Elimination 