If you design even just one game, it doesn't take long for you to realise that a game is mostly a maths exercise in disguise. You have a random selection of cards, and you compare numbers to see who wins. You roll dice, and the number you roll changes the state of the game. You count spaces on a boa...
Good storytelling is usually about the process of achieving something. That's the story part of a story. A character wants something, but can't have it. The character goes through some transformative trials until the thing is "earned", at which point the character gets the thing and the story is ove...
I was chatting with Jamie, the store manager at my local Warhammer store, about painting and he pointed out that there were lots of different colours for undercoat spray painting available. Depending on what you're painting, it might just be more efficient to undercoat a miniature in black or blue o...
The Internet's a funny place. You make friends you never meet, and sometimes inevitably you lose a friend, too. In June of 2024, the Internet lost Craig Maloney, a creative contributor to free culture, RPG, podcasting, and open source.
I never met Craig, or even talked to him, but I became a fan o...
Zombies are the perfect mindless threat. I'm a fan of zombies in movies and video games and tabletop games. Do you want to know why? Well, there are 10 reasons.
1. Zombies have no soul
You can kill them without remorse. You'll never walk into the back room of a bunker to find the innocent zombie...
It's widely (although not universally) accepted in tabletop gaming that it's fun to roll dice. Broadly speaking, that tends to be correct. There's a guarantee in rolling dice. You're either going to be happy because you get what you want, or else you're going to be surprised. We humans like getting...
A gaming miniature usually has a base it stands on so that the miniature doesn't tip over during your game. After you paint a miniature, the finishing touch is to clean up the base, because inevitably paint has splattered on to it as you've been painting. Some people decorate the base with tiny shru...
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...
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...
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...
My first experiences in hobby shops (specifically, but not exclusively, a Warhammer store) were not great. And yet some of my best experiences in the hobby have happened in a Warhammer store. I think there's a secret to turning a geeky hobby, like building and paintng 28mm toy soldiers so you can pl...
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...
After you paint a hundred miniatures or so, you might find that you start to get a sense that some miniatures are fun to paint, while others are less fun. It might seem strange that there would be a difference. It's tempting to assume that one hunk of plastic is the same as any other hunk of plastic...
The Contrast line of paints by Citadel are designed to provide instant highlighting and shading with just one coat of paint from just one pot. When it works, it's the stuff of science fiction. To this day, I sit and marvel at my painted Ur-Ghul miniatures, and all I did was slap some Pylar Glacier...
If you use miniatures in your tabletop games, it's easy to get spoiled when you start buying Citadel miniatures. Games Workshop miniatures tend to be high-quality, highly detailed, and super imaginative. In fact, if anything, Games Workshop is too imaginative. Really. Some of their sculpts are bizar...
Some people have the impression that solo games, or playing multiplayer games by yourself, are consolation for people with no friends. The assumption is that it's "normal" to buy a game for your family or your game group, and that you'd only resort to a solo game when there's something wrong. Maybe...