Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

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.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop-motion movie about a fox whose love of stealing chickens from local farms endangers his family and community. It's based on a Roald Dahl boo...

Last year, I developed and published Skuffle Wammer, the universe's smallest wargame. It's designed to be played in 5 minutes or less, with the intent of being the tabletop gaming equivalent of a good stand-up-and-stretch at work. The play area is an A4 sheet of paper, you throw out some miniature...

Player characters in an RPG can be tricky. A player character is an imaginary person who you're meant to speak for and control. The character is meant to be distinct from you (in reality), and you're also supposed to be mindful of fellow gamers at your table (in reality) which obviously your fiction...

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...

Last year, Catalyst Games ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund BattleTech: Mercenaries, an expansion set of miniatures for BattleTech: A game of armoured combat. I don't play BattleTech (yet?) but I like mechs, I'd like to paint some miniature mechs, and I do play some mech battle wargames, so I...

I'm an avid fan of speculative fiction (SF), and have been for my entire life. I like a lot of different kinds of SF, but I do seem to have a preference for dystopic science fiction, specifically. In my exploration of that genre, I've noticed a sub-genre within it, which I'll just call superhuman d...

A defining aspect of geek culture, at least for me, is correlation. As a kid, I spent hours every day correlating different elements of a fictional universe to other elements within that universe, or else I'd correlate one fictional universe to a different one. That's why, for instance, the Dunge...