Games Workshop re-released the first edition (titled Rogue Trader) of Warhammer 40,000 to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. I bought a copy to taste the nostalgia that, as someone who started out in 40k in the 2000s, I never got to experience. I'm reviewing it chapter by chapter, and this p...
Within any gaming tradition, there emerges a myth that a "perfect" example of a game exists. A perfect game doesn't exist, of course, because we all have a unique definition of perfect. That said, if a game is close to being perfect, it's Firefight by Mantic Games, and here's why.
I'm a fan of...
In 2018, Games Workshop released the Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress. A combination between a dungeon crawl, a roleplaying game, and a wargame, Blackstone Fortress is a campaign-based game with varied mechanics and an emerging storyline. I bought the game 4 years after its release, and it's...
Monkey Palace is a board game by Lego about building stairs to the monkey palace, and it combines the innate fun of building Lego with clever board game mechanics that include resource management and board strategy. It's not just a Lego set, it's a legitimately well-designed board game that exercis...
I've been running dnd for a long time. The number of times I've asked a female player what class she'd like to play and she's answered "witch" is not insignificant. For a long while, this was solved pretty easily by just using Pathfinder, which I appreciated because it was a great excuse to run Path...
Games Workshop re-released the first edition (titled Rogue Trader) of Warhammer 40,000 to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. (I'm not sure about their maths. The book was released in 1987, and the re-release was announced in 2023 and shipped to customers in 2024.) What little nostalgia I hav...
Every time I play a complex board game, I think about crafting an organiser tray for all the game pieces. This imagined tray would have compartments for cards of varying sizes, tokens, dice, and so on, for several player characters, to help me manage and preserve the state of an ongoing game. A lot...
For the past year, I've been running Tales of the Valiant (ToV) for my local gaming group's weekly game session. The campaign started with Princes of the Apocalypse but after several side quests, the players have become thoroughly distracted and it's now a mix of Princes, Saltmarsh, and random K...
I'm playing through all the Mansions of Madness scenarios I own, and reviewing each one as I go. Vengeful Impulses is part of the Beyond the Threshold expansion, and it's rated 2 stars difficulty (the lowest for any scenario I've seen so far). This review contains spoilers.
The premise of th...
I love a good solo or co-op game, but I also happen to play a few board games with programmed "game masters". Sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a deck of cards (as with Fallout the Board Game), and sometimes it's an app (as with Mansions of Madness). When something's programmed, it's essen...
When you hear the term "wargame", you probably think "big" because a war is big. It's not a skirmish, it's not a battle, it's not an operation or a sting or astrike, it's a war. Because a war is big, there's a general admiration and excitement in the wargaming community for an expansive game board...
You don't have to see many games of Dungeons & Dragons in movies or TV shows to know that media doesn't understand how D&D works. But with the innovation of homemade videos and podcasts distributed over the Internet, we've all gotten access to "live play" shows of real people actually playing tabl...
I'm playing through all the Mansions of Madness scenarios I own, and reviewing each one as I go. Shattered Bonds is the third adventure listed in the app, and it's rated 5 stars (the highest rating in the game) for difficulty. This review contains spoilers.
I've already said in previous review...
In August 2024, a rulebook called Boarding Actions was released for Warhammer 40,000. As an expansion for the game, Boarding Actions provides missions inside the corridors of vast space ships, which means that having terrain to build walls and doors is essential to the game. Without walls and...
My introduction to miniatures was through D&D. When I started out, miniatures weren't generally found in board games (or at least, not any I'd been exposed to) and I didn't know about wargaming, so miniatures were a thing for "pen and paper" RPGs. By the time I started buying them for myself, the ea...
I've been playing a lot of Mansions of Madness lately, and I've noticed that I spend way too much time sorting through game assets. A character gains a clue, and I grab the container of interaction tokens instead. A character uses a spell and has to draw a new one, and I grab the Conditions deck i...