I've been running Tomb of Annihilation for my gaming group and the adventuring party ended up in a hex near the east coast that was (as most hexes are in Tomb of Annihilation) pretty empty. In a desperate move to give the adventure some direction, I'd already made an early introduction of the...
Snarling Badger recently released Deth Wizards, a skirmish wargame in which you play a necromancer and undead minions. I've enjoyed Snarling Badger products so far, and I like the idea of playing a necromancer with a little team of wights and wraiths and zombies. I bought the physical book and th...
The board game (or is it a wargame?) Zombicide is a brutal and exciting and imbalanced fight for survival. In the game, up to six Survivors embark on a mission (usually to retrieve supplies or a special weapon) in a city infested with up to 70-ish zombies. Of course, zombies are zombies. They sha...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 4: Over Hill and Under Hill.
This review contai...
I remember when I first learned about washes. It was a Youtube video demonstrating a dip wash, where you take your entire painted miniature and just dip it into a tin of watery paint, shake it off, and let it dry. I wasn't painting miniatures yet, myself, but it made an impression on me, because the...
I sometimes play the Genestealer Cults faction in Warhammer 40,000. The new Genestealer Cults codex recently came out. I already own the digital index and the physical reference cards, but I purchased the new book for a few different reasons, and I've read it from cover to cover. This is my review...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 3: A Short Rest.
This review contains spoilers....
Some board games use special proprietary dice. They're fun because they can emphasize the game's theme. However, dice can also be easy to misplace, and sometimes you lose the dice you need to play a game. Here's how to convert special dice to normal dice for your board games.
Option 1: Numbers
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In The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books, Tolkien manages to cultivate a gravity around many of the fictional items and creatures he's invented. In retrospect, it starts with the titular ring itself, The One Ring as it's notated in the RPG and wargame derivatives, but it includes famous creat...
The Dark Imperium trilogy is a series set during the Cicatrix Maledictum era (which, at the time of this writing, is the "current" time of Warhammer 40,000). It's notable because it features Roboute Guilliman, the primarch of the Ultramarines, risen from a centuries-long coma. This is my review...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 2: Roast Mutton.
This review contains spoilers....
Buying miniature kits has been an interesting learning experience for me as a newcomer to the wargaming hobby. There are lots of miniature designers and vendors out there, and I don't know of an easy way to get a feel for each one without buying a box of models to find out. I don't have the time, mo...
It's easy to look at a wargame and think that it's essentially "just" the combat system of an RPG. All the G without the R or the P. Similarly, it's easy to look at the original RPG (the fabled Chainmail supplement by Gygax and Arneson, I mean) and notice that the RPG was meant to be all the stuff b...
Wargames are usually big, meaning they're physically large. They're about wars by design, so they're meant to evoke the epic scale of great historical or fictional battles. You play a wargame on a big table, with terrain so elaborate that it qualifies as a diorama, with thirty or sixty or even a hun...
While I was painting a Warhammer 40,000 Genestealer Cult army and an opposing army of Adeptus Mechanicus, I decided to listen to the book Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work by Guy Haley. This is my review of it, and it contains no spoilers. But I'll cut to the chase and say that this is one of the...
I recently realised that reading Tolkien is a solo RPG. You read his work, you piece together the scraps of lore he sprinkled thnoughout the books and left to us in the form of letters, and you ponder it and map it out until you understand Middle Earth. If he'd been alive today, he'd have just got...