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...
I've been thinking about the games I play, and what kinds of games I tend to enjoy playing the most. I've written about atmosphere, mechanics, and even mechanics previously, and these apply equally to tabletop and video games. The component I'm thinking about lately is the glorious feeling of...
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...
Before I plucked up the courage to try painting miniatures, I basically thought it was just too hard. I have bad eyes, not terribly steady hands, and I'd never done anything with paint since watercolours in elementary school. Eventually, I gave it a go and while I don't claim to be good at it, the r...
I use Contrast and Vallejo Xpress Color paints almost exclusively, and I can't think of one I'd toss aside. I've noticed, though, that there's one Contrast paint I find myself using over and over again, and for sometimes very different textures. If, for some reason, you want to buy just one Contrast...
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...
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...