I've been having a lot of fun playing the narrative campaign of Space Station Zero by Adam Loper and Vince Venturella, and this is my review of the game. The rules are, impressively, just 44 pages out of its total 120 pages. You read about 20 pages for the rules (after which, you've learned everyt...
When I first read The Silmarillion as a kid, I didn't understand what it was and I didn't understand what it was trying to say or do. But I recently decided that reading Tolkien was a little like collecting lore achievements in a video game. The main quest is to understand The Hobbit and The Lo...
Like much of the existing Tolkien work outside of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (LOTR), the content of Children of Húrin was written long ago and stashed in Tolkien's writing desk for half a century. Parts of the story were published here and there, including in the The Silmarillion, but...
I was the target audience for the original Star Wars. Or at least, I was the audience the movies found. I've heard from slightly older friends of mine that they saw the original Star Wars (it wasn't called "A New Hope" or even "Episode IV" then) when they were teens. I wasn't old enough to see the o...
I've collected five or six small armies for wargaming, but I'm still new to the hobby. I've (maybe slower than I should have) noticed some patterns about the process of preparing an army. These are the 5 steps I'm trying to take while planning to assemble an army.
When I'm think...
Do you have an irrational fear of painting miniatures, because you just know you'll mess it up? I had the same problem, and still do every time I sit down with a freshly primed miniature. Unpainted, the miniature is basically perfect. It's just really really plain. But perfect. And when you start pa...
I picked up the Black Ops wargame, written by Guy Bowers and published by Osprey Games, and have had a great time playing it. This is my review of it as a book and as a game system.
The Black Ops book is in the ubiquitous blue book series by Osprey, so it's the usual 64 pages sprinkled with te...
"You're going to take journey to a time and place you've been before. All you have to do is follow the sound of my voice."
It's the not-too-distant future. The world's oceans have risen, leaving most land masses flooded by varying degrees. There have been mass uprisings as flood refugees scramble...
The Fallout video games are the story of a desolate and dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Each Fallout is a computer RPG known by varying degrees for branching story paths, player agency, a unique real-time yet turn-based combat system, and character customization. The board game attempts to...
One of the best zombie movies I've seen, and I've seen a bunch. This probably isn't for every zombie movie fan. It's relatively low-budget, or maybe mid-budget, the pacing is slow, and the zombies probably aren't what you're used to. But this movie is absolutely unique, for lots of reasons, and ever...
If you've played a popular RPG like Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, or anything in with direct D&D lineage, then you know that there are at least two modes of the game. First, there's the roleplaying mode. When you're roleplaying, you pretend to talk to non-player characters and you make choic...
In an effort to keep better track of what I watch, I'm reviewing the movies and shows as much as I can. No spoilers in this one.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a Netflix anime series based on the Cyberpunk video game, which is in turn based on the Cyberpunk roleplaying game. I own the Night City...
Games Workshop re-released the first edition (titled Rogue Trader) of Warhammer 40,000 to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. (I'm not sure about their maths. The book was released in 1987, and the re-release was announced in 2023 and shipped to customers in 2024.) Because it's got so much of...
I read Knights of Macragge by Nick Kyme, partly because I'm mystified by Black Library's sequencing, and this is my review. This review contains spoilers.
I thought Knights of Macragge might be part of the Indomitus series, which is weird because Indomitus (I think) isn't a series but a si...
Not "The Arrival" with Charlie Sheen, just "Arrival (2016)".
Scifi has a funny history with cinema. It started out as cheap pulp fiction about grown men in funny suits. And then history started all over with 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie redefined what scifi could be, and I think broadly sp...
I played the Shadow of Mordor video game to completion, and I enjoyed it, so this is my review of the game. The game is a Warner Bros. game and I've heard that its combat system is a lot like the Arkham games, but as of this writing I've not played those games (I like Batman, and I've meant to pla...