I've been playing Mansions of Madness a lot lately, which is a game I love but also one that inspires a lot of thought about strategy and roleplay. In a tabletop roleplaying game, like Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder or Shadowrun, you often make up a strategy based on how you think your...
I've been running a Tomb of Annihilation campaign for about a year now, and I can't honestly say it's been quite as nice as running a good module like Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or Rise of the Runelords. It's my fault, because Tomb of Annihilation is actually a sandbox. I understand the...
When the video game Banner Saga came out, one of the exciting things about it was that its sprites were all hand-drawn. From screenshots and game play footage, it looked like you'd be playing a Ralph Bakshi movie or a good Saturday morning cartoon. That seemed really cool to me, and so I bought th...
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 6: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire.
This r...
I read Knights of Macragge by Nick Kyme, partly because I'm mystified by Black Library's sequencing, and this is my review. This review contains spoilers.
I thought Knights of Macragge might be part of the Indomitus series, which is weird because Indomitus (I think) isn't a series but a si...
I picked up the Black Ops wargame, written by Guy Bowers and published by Osprey Games, and have had a great time playing it. This is my review of it as a book and as a game system.
The Black Ops book is in the ubiquitous blue book series by Osprey, so it's the usual 64 pages sprinkled with te...
My 1st edition Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team is one of those books that I actually feel lucky to have purchased. I could have easily not purchased it. But I did, and I still have it, and that's good because 7 years after its release it's still one of the best introductory products into Warhammer 40,...
About 6 years ago, I bought a set of hero miniatures by Wizkids. They weren't the first miniatures I'd ever bought, but at the time they were the nicest, partly because they were already painted in the box (I didn't think I was capable of painting miniatures back then, and to be fair didn't really...
I read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Indomitus by Gav Thorpe, and this is my review. This post contains spoilers.
You know how there are episodes of Star Trek (TOS and TNG) where our heroes beams down to a planet to save a civilisation in peril, and then there are episodes of Star Trek where our...
We humans seem to really enjoy miniaturized versions of real world objects. We have doll houses and action figures and model trains and miniatures for gaming. I'm new to the game miniature world, and being new means I get the privilege of making a bunch of mistakes. Here's what I've learnt about the...
If you're used to D&D 5e but have [wisely] switched away from Wizards of the Coast, then you might be playing Pathfinder 2. And if you're the Game Master for a Pathfinder 2 campaign, then you might notice your players staying at level 1 for a lot longer than you're used to. D&D 5e and its unofficial...
I hear a lot about the Warhammer 40,000 skirmish game, Kill Team, and people seem to really love it. In fact, there's a significant player base out there who seem to like it more than 40k. I was curious enough to investigate, but not $145 NZD curious (the cost of the Kill Team Starter Set, so...
I have a handful of early Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine miniatures, which I purchased on TradeMe just to practise painting back when I was just starting to explore the wargaming hobby. I don't intend to play the 3rd edition of Warhammer 40,000 but nevertheless I thought it might be fun to...
I recently listened to the Eye of Night audio drama, written by Gav Thorpe for the Warhammer 40,000 Black Library. It's a pretty short production, consisting of three files that total about 60 minutes in total. It's a proper audio drama, like an actual radio play, and it's a lot of fun to hear....
Visually, you can never go wrong by adding a skull or two. I don't know what it is about the insides of our own heads, but for some reason we humans think fleshless cranial bones are pretty cool. I'm no exception, and in fact I've had a tattoo of a skull on my arm for years now. Skulls are iconic an...
Like all humans, tabletop gamers sometimes make irrational choices. We do it in our games, but we also do it when choosing what game to play. I've written before about how I sometimes play a video game for its soundtrack, and I'm happy to admit that I play some tabletop games for seemingly trivial...