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…
Wavelength is an elite party game. It features energetic team play, interesting discussion, and a monolithic plastic dial that generates a random position along a spectrum. All of these contribute to its success. I was intrigued when I heard that publisher CMYK was issuing a diminutive card-based version of this game. I wondered how it…
Abroad gives off a vibe. It presents as a pleasant little outing, maybe something akin to Parks or Trekking the World. This is deceiving. It is not a cozy travel game. It’s a stout mid-weight fella that’s more robust than it appears. In fact, it wanders in the region of burgeoning modern tableau builders like…
Grabble sounds dumb. You take it off the shelf, remove the lid, and put the game box in the middle of the table. The box is the playing arena, so yes, I’m hitting you with the “place the board in the center of the table” instruction. In the box is a bunch of junk. Shiny…
Ivan Turner is digging deep to bring us the third installment in his This Game is KILLER franchise. I was pleased with the initial offering, a riff on Ridley Scott’s Alien that took the form of a half hour semi-cooperative party game. Players slink about their ship, attempting to stave off death and kill the…
You can pinpoint moments where things change, where ripples meet ripples and creativity shifts. Dominion concocted deckbuilding. Love Letter gave the microgame sex appeal. The Crew pulled trick-takers from the ground like a necromancer. Now, Balatro is whispering in the minds of designers, calling forth Ace of Spades, Rolling Deep, and the subject of this…
Kasper Lapp, Voight-Kampff test, 10-minute social deduction game is the kind of pitch I hope to hear when riding the elevator. Lapp previously designed quirky hits like Magic Maze and That’s Not a Hat, so his brand of silly seems uniquely appropriate for this sort of nonsense. When it works the playful interrogation is both…
You’re stuck in a foreign place. It’s a prison of walls and darkness and fear manifest. Do you trust the unknown formless hand? Do you expose your vulnerability for a glimpse of truth? Do you recoil or do you meet The Presence? The Presence is a ghost story. It’s an indie work that draws obvious…
This review is based on a pre-production copy of the game that is expected to be nearly identical to the final product. I love MOBA games. My time playing League of Legends and DOTA are well in the rearview, but many of these games’ concepts work extraordinarily well on the table. Team play. Miniatures skirmish-like…
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…
Tag Team was a noteworthy competitor in 2025. Its combination of smooth card play with the unpredictable drama of auto-battling forms a compelling build. So compelling in fact, that it seized my affection previously allocated to games like Unmatched and Dice Throne. Anyone with eyes could see this new Scorpion Masqué title was not a one-off.…
After a decade of work, Jenna Felli continues to evolve and shirk a single design style. One continuing trait that has stuck around since her origin is an embracement of the bizarre. But even that is possibly on the chopping block. From Shadows of Malice to Zimby Mojo to Cosmic Frog, I’d dare to say,…
Y’all know the difference between a bilge rat and a man-eater? I’m talking ’bout the bad fish. One that will swallow you whole. Roll you ’round in its jaws and squeeze the life out a ya. This cutter, in the year of our lord 2019, was a fierce gnawer. Still is! She’s among the best…
War is morally questionable, at best a compromise between inaction and horrific aggression. The societal and human costs are often extreme. There are benefits, however. Achieving independence. Ending tyranny. Freeing an enslaved population. Often, violence is the only remaining option. Rapid technological advancement is another benefit. One typically overlooked due to its insignificance in contrast…
Whenever people liberally throw around words like “innovative” or “unique” with recently published games, I can’t help but clench my jaw. It’s a difficult pothole to avoid, as the promises spat by titles in the crowdfunding era are necessarily braggadocios. We’re all guilty of this from time to time. It’s natural to pile on superlatives…
Geoff Engelstein was influential in bringing Takashi Ishida’s Magical Athlete to the United States in 2003. It’s unsurprising that Geoff, alongside his children Brian and Sydney, have tapped into the spirit of that phenomenal race game, pairing its traditional roll and move structure with several new flourishes. In fact, there is so much of that…
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…
You’re stumbling through the labyrinthine streets of Old Angeles; your clothes soaked in rain and neon. The city is a mix of perpetual darkness and the unending belch of industrialization. But at least you’re not alone. Your private investigation firm is staffed by the other stiffs sitting around the table. All of you are working…
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…
Rubén Hernández’s Dodos Riding Dinos was one of those games people talked about. The kind of nutty activity that combines a longstanding tabletop genre with silly dexterity elements. I mentally associated it with killer titles like SEAL Team Flix, PitchCar, and Space Cadets. These games marry the frivolous kinetic energy of flicking with a more…
Anmelden
