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...
Monsters attack ancient Rome! Can your legionaries defeat them? I've been playing Broken Legions by Mark Latham, published by Osprey Games, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. I picked up the book because I like alternate history, and also because this seemed like an excellent excuse t...
I recently read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint by David Annandale, and this is my review of the book, with no more spoilers than you'd get from the back of the book. I picked this book up based entirely on its title (a heretic saint? How does that work??) and cool...
Armies in Warhammer 40,000 aren't meant to be static. Like the game world itself, your army is meant to be a developing force, with new recruits and veteran soldiers sharing the battlefield, learning and adapting and improving as they experience new horrors of war. To simulate that, Warhammer 40,...
Like many hobbyist game designers before me, I recently had the idea of taking photographs of beautiful fantasy-like settings, for lack of a reliable source of custom illustration, and use them in a game book. No matter how hard I tried though, I just couldn't make the photographs feel like a fantas...
Back in the early days of the video arcade, you paid to play a game for as long as you wanted, until you lost. For whatever reason, it was pretty common for you to have 3 attempts before the game decided you had truly lost the game and the coin you'd inserted into the arcade cabinet. When home conso...
Once you learn the rules to Warhammer 40,000, you're in for a nasty surprise. To play the game, you also have to learn the rules for your army. You need to know your army special rules, you need to know your warlord's enhancements, detachment stratagems, unit and character abilities, plus the core...
If you've never read the Lord of the Rings, or you read it a long time ago, then you might not realise that there are 6 books in the series. They're sold in just 3 volumes, called Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, but each volume is divided into two books ea...
Starting in 2025, I'm mirroring this blog on my Gopher site. What's a Gopher site, how do you access it, and why am I posting content there? That's what this post is about.
What is Gopher
Essentially, Gopher was the Internet before the Internet existed. The infrastructure for computers to commun...
For me, the Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City releases of the Warhammer Quest boxed game from Games Workshop are practically perfect games. They're extremely replayable, but they're board games and are, appropriately, bound to their boards. They each tell a specific story. Blackstone Fortr...
About half-way through the lifespan of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, a company called Paizo was commissioned to take over publication. After the Dungeon and Dragon and Polyhedron magazines were discontinued, Paizo obstinantly continued to publish adventures for D&D. And from magazine t...
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 5: Riddles in the Dark.
This review contains sp...
I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy, and this is my review of The Buried Dagger by James Swallow, book 54 in the series. It's also the last book in the series, or at least the last book before the start of the Siege of Terra series. This book (weirdly?) splits its time between two distinct stories,...
After seeing a handful of the remakes, I recently decided to sit down and watch the original 1960s Ocean's Eleven. I assumed, without giving it a second thought, that the remakes inherited their structure from the original movie. Everybody knows that Ocean's Eleven is the original heist movie, a...
In Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant and similar fantasy roleplaying games, you go on adventures to find treasure and magical items and weapons so you can go on even bigger adventures. That's meant to be exciting. But with great power comes the potential for great boredom, because when you sto...
Everybody has their own tolerance levels for how complex they want a game engine to be. In fact, many of us have a different preference depending on the game. The current trend, and I assume the trajectory games are on in general, is that there's beauty in simplicity. Things are more fun when they r...