I played the Dark Reflections DLC for Mansions of Madness, and this is my review of it. My short spoiler-free summary is that Dark Reflections is an intriguing investigative adventure with a highly engaging story. This review contains spoilers about situations in the adventure, but not the plo...
With the exception of a handful of pioneering academics and specialist publications, serious critical consideration of gaming as an art form feels, to me, to be seriously lacking. Sure, it's commonly accepted that gaming is now very much mainstream, but it's pretty clear that what most people are t...
Early in 2026, Games Workshop released a new edition of Necromunda. This took a lot of players by surprise because Necromunda isn't one of the games that gets frequent updates, compared to the company's bigger games, like Warhammer 40,000. Even more intriguing was the game's new subtitle. It w...
I've been reading through the Call of Cthulhu adventure collection Mansions of Madness, Volume 1: Behind Closed Doors, and this is my review of the fourth scenario, called House of Memphis. I've reviewed Mister Corbitt, The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse, and The Code from this book. This rev...
It can be hard to believe, but there really was a time back in the 1980s when people thought that tabletop roleplaying games (amongst other forms of media) were "satanic". Generally that's called the time of the Satanic Panic, but that only prompts further questions. What does it mean to be "satan...
In previous posts, I've deconstructed the Dungeoneer set Realm of the Ice Witch to study its setting and characters. In this post, I'm looking at its game play.
Winter frontier
In theory, it doesn't take much to establish a setting in a tilebased tabletop game. If the game takes place in...
In a previous post, I reviewed the chariot racing expansion for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar called Wasteland Death Race, published in issue 518 of White Dwarf. This is a battle report of a race, using the full set of rules (with build points and Artefacts of Power).
The game rules are basical...
One of the most fun things about wargaming is how well its scope scales. You can play literally one character in a squad as either a roleplaying game or a regimented skirmish game, you can play a whole detachment with anywhere from 10 to 100 models, or you can play with an entire regiment. Appropri...
In previous posts, I've analysed the setting and characters of the Dungeoneer set Vault of Fiends. In this post, I review the vault for its game play.
Vault of Fiends is a brutal dungeon crawl that focuses on negative effects and deadly monsters. Your job in Vault of Fiends is to avoid...
I urged my gaming group to take the gaming survey (it's closed by now)from Questing Beast that's been making the rounds, and they did, and I also told some people who play in my games on an irregular basis to take the survey. If you took the survey, then you may recall that there's a question aski...
I bought a starter set for The One Ring not because I'm starting to play The One Ring (although I am, incidentally) but because I wanted The One Ring dice and a nice copy of the map of Eriador, and the boxed starter set contains those items. Confusingly, however, there's not just one starter s...
The year 2025 was a good year for White Dwarf magazine. Issues 515 and 516 released Space Marine Operations, a co-op mode for Warhammer 40,000, and I honestly didn't think it could get better than that. But then in November there came issue 518, which at first glance seemed like it would be an...
In previous posts, I've deconstructed the Dungeoneer set Den of the Wererats to analyse its setting and characters. In this blog post, I review it for its gameplay.
As with Haunted Woods of Malthorin, Wererats is a small set, being about half the size of a standard Dungeoneer game. B...
At high levels in dnd and Pathfinder and similar games, combat takes literal hours to get through. If you only play for a few hours at a time, then there are some game sessions that you're not playing a roleplaying game, but a wargame. You may be roleplaying in the sense that you are using your char...
When I started playing Dungeoneer back in 2014, I correctly assumed that you were meant to add your Movement attribute to Movement Threat checks. I made this assumption because you added your other 2 attributes (Melee and Magic) to checks related to them. This blog post exists exclusively to rei...
I design dungeons in idle time, and sometimes I even run them. I also run lots of dungeons other people have designed. In both scenarios, there are times when I encounter a thing in the design of the dungeon that makes it suddenly complex to run. I tend to be mindful, now, of this when I create my o...