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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
I decided that during 2024, I'd make one game every month. I thought it appropriate to finish it off in the way it began. This month, I've created Spelljack, another extreme remix of Blackjack.
One of my previous blackjack remixes had magic-like powers granted to players pretty much at random. Y...
Zombies are the perfect mindless monster, a great threat for any setting. They're some of my favourite enemies for so many reasons, and that's probably part of the reason they tend to pop up in the games I play. I don't consciously favour them, because they can become tedious unless the game is, f...
I know what you're thinking. You're asking yourself "Why is this Ironstrider Ballistarii from the year 40,000 CE fighting Roman soldiers in 44 CE?"
Is it a simple matter of a misplaced decimal point? Time travel? A cloned Earth stuck in the past, like System 892 in Star Trek original series? Or...
In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Genestealer Cult is a forbidden religious body of humans that worship aliens. And not just any alien. They worship the evil human-eating, legally-distinct [not] xenomorphs, the Tyranids. At first, I viewed them as a sort of an unexciting mishmash of Chaos Cu...
When I started painting miniatures, I painted the models that came included in board games. Those weren't exactly high quality miniatures, but they were fun and I was just excited to have painted playing pieces. Hungry for more, I bought the Games Workshop board game Blackstone Fortress, which inc...
I'm a hobbyist game designer, and I love looking at games for ideas on how to improve or change them for fun.
Blackjack is a simple card game played with a standard deck of playing cards. On your turn, you may draw a card from a draw deck and put it into your hand. Should you decide to abstain fro...