Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

A few months ago, I tried Vallejo Xpress Color paints. Aside from the bottles they come in, I like them a lot. They're a great way to get started painting with auto-shading paints for a relatively small investment. It's got a limited colour range, but when you're just starting out, less can be mor...

I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.

I'm enjoying this series on several levels, but what comes through the most in this episode is the war. In...

The problem with colour is that there's a lot of it, and it's never the same to two different people. It's not even the same to one person under different lighting conditions. I love the topic of colour theory, but when you're just starting out as a miniatures painter, it can be overwhelming to see...

Sometimes, after you've painted a miniature you need to go back and fix a mistake you hadn't caught the first time around. When you revise your paint job, though, you're usually filling in something that's missing or concealing something that isn't meant to be there. That means you have to match the...

I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.

Professor Lillian Stemmler (Eve Arden) has developed an experimental drug that temporarily boosts (or reduces) all attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, a...

I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There may be very minor spoilers in this post, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.

This is going to hurt

Jurgen and Baldur are now officially on the trail of Bellona's killer. Bal...

I've written before that you can never have too many spells for roleplaying games like Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant, and that's as true for the Game Master as it is for player characters. The problem isn't having too many spells to choose from, it's how to know what spells you have avai...

Like a lot of (or all? is this a defining trait?) geeks, I'm pretty obsessive by nature. I focus on things intensely, and work in sprints so I can concentrate my current obsession into productivity (by some definition of "productive"). I work in the tech industry, which also works in sprints, so I'v...

Death is so frequently the lose condition in games that I think you could argue it's a little lazy. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind when a game threatens my game avatar with death. In fact I enjoy it as a threat. Morbid though it may be, I enjoy imaginary over-the-top violence and pretend gore in m...

I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review of it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.

This show is 2D animatation, done only in black and white. It's a lot of computer 2D animation but even w...

Recently, I watched the Iron Within animated feature on Warhammer+, and this is my review of it. The feature is about 30 minutes long, of beautifully rendered by somewhat rigid 3D animation. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.

Iron

...

With the exception of a handful of pioneering academics and specialist publications, serious critical consideration of gaming as an art form feels, to me, to be seriously lacking. Sure, it's commonly accepted that gaming is now very much mainstream, but it's pretty clear that what most people are t...

Most tabletop roleplaying game systems have the concept of rolling dice as a way of determining whether a player character in the game succeeds or fails when attempting a non-trivial task. A die roll doesn't itself have any meaning. A 20 on a 20-sided die is just a number, no better or worse than a...

At the time of this writing, I'm preparing to run Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. It's been out for a good 5 years, and I've played scenarios from it, but I've yet to run it. As I read through the book to prepare for the game, I've decided to post about my impressions. This review contai...

At the time of this writing, I'm running Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. As I read through the book, I've decided to post about my impressions. Although I started this review before the campaign started, I'm now running this module (using Pathfinder 2, incidentally) for my weekly session,...

I'm a hobbyist game designer. I love looking at games for ideas on how to improve or change them for fun, and I enjoy making up new games. I've arbitrarily decided that during 2024, I'm going to publish one new game each month. Some will be mods of existing games, others will be new games I've devel...