Don't worry, this will make sense eventually.
All I play anymore is trick-taking games. Fortunately, it’s an uncommonly smart genre. Today I’m covering three titles that highlight both the format’s breadth and what makes trick-taking one of tabletop’s most enduring pastimes — and one of its meanest. In other words, these are trick-takers for jerkwads. Compliment intended. Shortstack Marceline Leiman has been […]
According to one of my uncles, the terms “right” and “left” derive from the fact that conservatism is correct while liberalism is wrong. You know, because we say “that’s right” to mean “that’s correct” and “that’s left” when we’ve suffered a serious brain hemorrhage and don’t remember how words work. In actuality, the right/left divide […]
I never played Spyrium, William Attia’s 2013 game of steampunk factories, but I heard good things about its worker placement/removal system. Greylune, as near as I can tell, recaptures that title’s core appeal, while swapping the geared top hats for a more generic — but maybe more blandly appealing? — fantasy universe. As expected, the […]
There was a run there, between the aughts and the teens of the current century, when Victory Point Games published multiple of the best solitaire board games ever. Banger after banger. Then it was sold and chopped up for parts. Perhaps the best title to emerge from that golden age was Hermann Luttmann’s Dawn of […]
As a natural melancholic, the idea of being drawn to the sea — to drown one’s regrets, whether figuratively or bodily — makes me glad there isn’t a significant body of water within six hundred miles. It isn’t that suicide holds appeal for its own sake. Rather, it’s a fire door in the back, rigged […]
The first thing one notices about the third scenario in Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation is that the script has been flipped. Unlike both the Uruguay and Peru scenarios, which presented the COIN Series’s customary red insurgents facing off against government blues, here the entire color scheme has been inverted. Now the insurgent cylinders are […]
Nutgoo.Lee’s Blancat made my seven-year-old cry. I know. That’s a movable bar. She was tired from a long day of playing in the sun, but she wanted to try the “kittie quilting game” anyway. It ended in tears. That’s on me, not Blancat, and certainly it isn’t on Nutgoo.Lee. But here’s the thing: she practices […]
I won’t pretend to know what’s happening in Duel of Meloch. When we first got a glimpse of this world via Scythe, it was an alt-history Great War mechs-n’-boiled-barley affair. Then Expeditions rolled around and the whole thing took on a determinedly Strugatsky Brothers flair, all strange zones and alien meteors and zombified hussars. Now […]
For over five years (but fewer than seven), Postmark Games has published high-quality, low-cost print-and-play games. Oh, you need examples? How about roll-and-move titles like Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints? Or ditties like Battle Card, Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club? Or even 52 Realms: Adventures? Now the company is working on their first coin-flip title, […]
Not that long ago, my twelve-year-old daughter listed Tag Team as her favorite title of 2025. When I asked her whether that was still the case, she replied, “I like other games more, but I still like Tag Team.” There we have it, I guess. Except now there’s a second set, Arthur’s Legacy, that can […]