There are moments in life that are intractably written into my consciousness like images chiseled into bedrock. These are important things like the day I married my wife and the first time I saw my child. Some are less important – but still meaningful – like the first time I watched The Matrix or held…
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…