I love the game Zambicide, and I've written in the past that every wargamer should own a copy. The more I play it, the more I realise that actually every boardgamer ought to have it. Aside from my friends who just don't feel comfortable with horror, everyone I've introduced to Zombicide has an ama...
I've written before about how I play games for mechanics, puzzles, atmosphere, power, and even just for music. There's yet one more thing that attracts me to a game, and that's a good story.
It's pretty widely recognised that we humans are suckers for a good story. We love sharing experi...
Roleplaying games are often thought of as a game about storytelling. With no set script, a conglomerated story emerges even when major milestones and plot points have been predetermined. A story, of course, is a kind of journey from one state to another. A humble villager defeats a notorious villa...
I have fun playing wargames as campaigns and even as solo roleplaying games. There are lots of great ways to turn a game of 50 miniatures battling it out into a story, including making decisions based on key character models and just pausing to conceptualise why certain events during the previous ro...
I never had any interest in Tyranids, but recently I found a few spare sprues on Trademe (a local auction site) and it so happened that I needed some threatening aliens for a campaign I was about to run. Of course I had other options, but the price was good, there were a lot of them, and a good vari...
It's a constant battle. You can't get enough of the hobby you love, but you also can't possibly handle everything your hobby has to offer. But conversely, nothing is as annoying as wanting more from your hobby and suddenly finding you've got it all and there's nothing left. You want the perfect pace...
Wargames need soldiers. I own a bunch of miniatures designed for specific games, so I've been feeling the need lately to bolster my all-purpose miniatures. I wanted soldiers I could use across lots of games, from modern scenarios of Black Ops to sci-fi games of Rogue Stars, Space Station Zero,...
The Doom video games are the story of a guy, colloquially called "the Doom guy", killing demons. The Doom legacy started within the Union Aerospace Corporation facility on Mars, where scientists were experimenting with teleportation and ended up unleashing extraplanar horrors into the company, a...
One of my favourite hero archetypes is Joan of Arc. Speaking of her as a figure of myth rather than history, she's the perfect mix of chivalrous honour, unstoppable willpower, pervasive charisma, and toxic fanaticism. As a fictional trope, dystopian heroism lets fans embrace success as its own ethic...
In my Pathfinder Tomb of Annihiliation Pathfinder campaign, my players experienced (for better or for worse) the Tomb of the Nine Gods, a dungeon designed by the lich Acererak. This tomb was written as a modern version of Acererak's other tomb, the famous Tomb of Horrors. In my campaign, both tomb...
I'm continuing to rewatch every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
Since the show started developing the idea of THRUSH as an organisation of crime, it's had an awareness that THRUSH is literally a corporation, with all the concerns a corpor...