Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

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...

"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...

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...

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.) What little nostalgia I hav...

In this horror movie, Sara Price travels to Japan to look for her identical twin sister Jess, who was last seen wandering around in the Aokigahara forest near Mount Fuji. Everybody fears the worse, because Aokigahara is said to be a popular destination for people considering suicide. There's a lot o...

Army of Thieves is a prequel to the zombie movie Army of the Dead. Surprisingly, it's not zombie movie and it's one of those rare second films in a series that's better than the first.

Dieter was probably the only character in the first movie whose name I remembered after the movie was over. He...

Imagine a far future where space travel is trivial, mercenary missions are determined by a random table, and your wargame rules use a d20. Sound unlikely? It's all real, and it's a wargame by Andrea Sfiligoi called Rogue Stars, published by the ever-reliable Osprey Games.

Rogue Stars is a 64-pa...

At the time of this writing, Mantic Games is finishing up a Kickstarter campaign for a 10mm or 12mm mass warfare game called Epic Warpath. I'm a backer for several reasons. I can use the assets for the intended Warpath game, but also as auxiliary troops for some Mech games. I could, obviously, d...

I love lore. It's one of the reasons I play games. Having read through Mantic Games's Warpath Sourcebook, I've been thinking a lot about the quirky cyberpunk / hard sci fi / comedy-of-errors / war-ravaged universe that is the Warpath setting. On the surface, it's just kind of general wargame scie...

Las Vegas has been quarantined due to a zombie outbreak, and the USA plans on dropping a low-yield nuke to clear everything up. But there's 250 million dollars locked in a safe beneath a world-famous casino. Let's go in and retrieve the money!

It's a really good setup, 80% Escape from New York a...

A battle mat is useful in both wargames and roleplaying games, and there are lots of different options for what to use. Like many players, I use a mix of them, including Paizo's dry-erase grid boards and flipmaps, BattleTech map packs, and boards that come packaged with games like Zombicide and...