I play a lot of tabletop RPG and wargames and board games, and I'll admit I'm often drawn to the ones with complex rules, but that doesn't mean I want every game I play to have complex rules. Sure, part of the fun of tabletop gaming for me is seeing how the interaction of rules affect the simulated...
I decided that during 2024, I'd remix one game every month. Last month I created Rebel Blackjack. This month, I've created Magick jack, an extreme remix of Blackjack.
Colour pie
The colour pie in Magic: The Gathering (MTG) isn't often appreciated by people who don't play the game, but it's...
I decided that during 2024, I'd reinvent one game every month. This month, I decided to fix Monopoly.
I can't think of a board game as famous, or as reviled, than Monopoly. Nobody's ever accused Monopoly of good design, and while probably some people enjoy the game it's usually because they've...
I decided that during 2024, I'd reinvent one game every month. This month, I sat down with a game I've regretted buying to see whether I could make it fun.
Years ago, I asked an employee at a big game store about some games for 2 players. One game is quite well known, with lots of awards and posit...
Tales of the Valiant (ToV) is a tabletop roleplaying game developed by Kobold Press, replacing Dungeons & Dragons 5e. The game is fully compatible with 5e, meaning that you can use content from any 5e book in a Tales of the Valiant game. It doesn’t mean everything in ToV is suitable as a one-fo...
Tales of the Valiant is a new tabletop roleplaying game, developed by Kobold Press, to replace Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e). Back in December 2022 until January 2023, it was urgent that somebody replaced 5e, because Wizards of the Coast was claiming it had the right to control who could...
It's annoying that the Open Gaming License 1.0a is under attack, but it's not actually detrimental. As many people (and in fact possibly most people) recognize, you don't need anybody's permission to play a game at home, nor to write an adventure that happens to work with D&D™ 5th Edition. Don't c...
Many RPG rulebooks start out speaking in the bizarrely theoretical future tense, addressing the reader as if they were going to build a character: "First, you will choose a race, and then you will choose your skills." Then, over the course of the next few chapters, these player guides describe t...
At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast was attempting to unjustly, and probably unlawfully, revoke the Open Gaming License. They've recently agreed to stop that attempt, and as a sign of good faith they've released the System Reference Document (SRD) into Creative Commons. That's a minor...
Sometimes a game tells you to use a "percentile dice" or a d100. That can be confusing if you're not used to it, so here's how it's done.
Novelty die notwithstanding, there's no such thing as a d100. Instead, you use any one of four methods:
- Two ten-sided dice (d10) rolled in succession
- Two...
At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast is continuing their attempt to revoke the Open Gaming License. It doesn't much matter, at this point, whether they succeed. They've made their intent clear. They've made it impossible to trust them as caretakers of the legacy of the world's first rol...
In a recent leaked document, Wizards of the Coast has apparently threatened to revoke the Open Gaming License version 1.0a by stating that it will become "unauthorized." From what some lawyers are saying on the Internet, because the OGL 1.0a license does not use the magic word "irrevocable," this is...
The way I've always played D&D was that when your character was dead with no chance of resurrection, you built a new character and came back into the game at level 1. That's just the way me and my gaming groups have done it. Recently, I've started to pick up on the fact that not all gaming groups pl...
When Curse of Strahd was released for 5e, I didn't buy it because I already owned owned Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, a perfectly serviceable Strahd adventure. The Expedition to Castle Ravenloft adventure, released for D&D 3rd Edition, was itself a re-release of sorts, of the original Ravenl...
I don't own Curse of Strahd, arguably one of the most famous D&D 5e modules. I love that module, partly because I'm a sucker for horror and also because it's a really good module, and I do own Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. However, I'm the happy owner of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, the...
When the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide DMG came out back in 2014, I read it from cover to cover. I've decided to re-read the 5e DMG to re-discover anything I impatiently overlooked on my first read-through, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. In this post, I'm covering Chapter 5, "Adventure...