Before I started painting miniatures, I literally thought it would be beyond my ability. I have bad eyesight, a relatively short attention span (except when I'm obsessed and have hyper-focused attention), an abundance of energy, and unsteady hands. I couldn't imagine these traits being compatible wi...
Last month, I started reading Gate of Bones, and only realised after I finished that it was book 2 in the Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of Fire series. That says a lot for how modular Warhammer books are, and I really love that about them, and because I found Gate of Bones so satisfying, I didn't inte...
I don't want to hate the Space Wolves, but The Wolftime does the faction no favours. As a novel, it's got awkward pacing, a strangely anticlimactic story, and several unlikable characters. It left me disinterested in a faction that's pretty interesting on paper. I like the idea of space vikings,...
From 2017 until 2023, I was an editor for a blog site that got 2 million unique visitors a month. Whether I liked it or not, I had to learn something about the "ideal" blog post. As with all media, blogging is received in a specific way by most of its audience. People tend to read blogs differently...
Tabletop gamers have come up with three ways to measure distance in games that feature movement as a mechanic. There's the grid of 1-inch squares, there's the grid of hexagons, and there's the ruler or measuring tape. Over the past few decades, it's emerged that square grids are used for roleplaying...
I've been playing historical wargaming, or at least I've been playing wargames set in a historical time on Earth. The more I played with my Roman and Egyptian armies, the more I got curious about the actual histories of these fascinating historic empires. To quench my thirst for the "lore" of these...
Continuing my effort to develop one new game a month during 2024, this month I present Camp Pain, a post-apocalyptic wasteland campaign simulator. It's a dice rolling game in which you venture out into the badlands in search of weapons and food and meds. When you find something, you gain dice you...
There's a good argument that when you play a wargame, you're the General of your army. You have a seemingly god's-eye-view of the whole battlefield because you're getting constant updates from your soldiers on the ground. And yet, for me, I tend to willingly fall back on RPG tropes like "but my char...
I just finished reading Gav Thorpe's The Wolftime, book 3 in the Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of Fire series, and just because I didn't like it doesn't mean it's not well-written. Gav Thorpe wrote The Grey Raven, one of my favourite stories from Heralds of the Siege, and one of the reasons I liked...
I started reading Gate of Bones, and it wasn't until I'd finished it that I realised it was book 2 in the Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of Fire series. I'm sure the first book is very good, but I have to admit I got through all 384 pages of Gate of Bones book without any confusion, so I probably won't...
Having read about Roboute Guilliman's return to Warhammer 40,000, I decided to read Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar in the Primarchs book series. This is my review of the book. This post contains no spoilers.
I have no particular affinity for the Ultramarines, aside from the fact that th...
Browsing through the local second-hand market, I came across a rare game book called Magnamund Companion. This 100 page soft cover book was sort of a setting guide for Joe Dever's Lone Wolf RPG series. Now that I own a copy, I've read it from cover to cover, and this is my review.
Lone Wolf i...
I'm still new to the hobby, but by now I've painted over two hundred miniatures from 2 cm tall to 20 cm. I've made lots of mistakes but I've learned to avoid some and fix others. And yet I still experience a little trepidation when faced with a new miniature. I guess it's that paralysis you hear a...
I like sci fi wargames with super soldiers and battle mechs and drones. I like fantasy wargames with ghouls and vampires and vapire slayers. Wargames set in the real world never interested me, in part because the real world is uncomfortably close to home. Thanks to world wars and violent uprisings a...
The Dark Imperium trilogy is a series set during the Cicatrix Maledictum era (which, at the time of this writing, is more or less the "current" time of Warhammer 40,000). It's notable because it features Roboute Guilliman, the primarch of the Ultramarines, risen from a centuries-long coma. This...
I decided that during 2024, I'd create one game every month. This month, I've created AI v AI, a game of automated warfare.
In the far future, militaries have discovered that AI can kill better than humans can. But war without death is awfully boring, so militaries chain humans to the front of e...