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sGame stores can be a hit or miss thing. The great ones can be really, really great. Some of the rest can leave you wondering how the idea of a “Friendly Local Game Store” even caught on. Meeples Games in Seattle goes beyond the cliché right out of the gate, however. They bill themselves as your Friendly […]
Guest Post by Misha Burnett: And The Devil Will Drag You Under by Jack Chalker
Monday , 9, May 2016 Appendix X 6 CommentsA Man Of Wealth And Taste: Jack Chalker’s And The Devil Will Drag You Under Jack L Chalker is known for his series novels—the Well Of Souls series probably being the most famous. I can’t comment on any of them, I think I may have tried to read Midnight At The Well Of Souls once, […]
The 1970s continued the same pattern set in the late 1960s with anthologies that were not Weird Tales centric but did reprint a few stories per book. Peter Haining was possibly the greatest English anthologist of horror and weird fiction. He got his start in the late 1960s with The Hall of Mirrors (Four Square […]
Short Reviews will wrap up the Summer 1945 issue of Planet Stories next week with Chester Whitehorn’s Coming of the Gods. Again it’s time to look at the letters to the editor sections of SF mags from the days of yore in search of juicy tidbits and glimpses of what was relevant and interesting to […]
Masha K. (Marina’s Musings) “Each step brings more revelations, more complexity more demands on the reader’s brainpower and attention span, and you come out on the other end having not just read but experienced something very special.” Hans G. Schantz (ÆtherCzar) “As in his also excellent recent novel, Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm, […]
Answering the RPG Critic: Left Over Lies from the Satanic Panic
Thursday , 5, May 2016 Games, Tabletop Games, Uncategorized, Wargames 3 CommentsDarren Molitor played Dungeons & Dragons for many years as a youth and became convinced from a personal perspective that role playing games are unhealthy and should be avoided, and wrote a guide for the interested non-player as a warning. At first he gives a basic overview of character generation to introduce the uninitiated. Then […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Wargame Design, Role-Playing Games, and… (please no!) LARPS
Wednesday , 4, May 2016 Wargames 4 CommentsThe bombshell post of the week is over at Neal Durando’s Defense Linguistics blog: Not only had The Forge alerted me to EMGs, it had also provided many fruitful discussions of how player expectations might best come when a game system supports those expectations. Briefly, some players simply want to win any game while others […]
“For those who think that World War I is an unexciting subject for a game, GUNS OF AUGUST will prove a shock comparable to the appearance of British tanks at Cambrai, and German stosstrupen at Caporetto.” – The Guns of August, Box Text Bold words, Avalon Hill. I was keeping my fingers crossed that a […]
Karl Gallagher’s Torchship Takes the First Planetary Award for Best Novel
Tuesday , 3, May 2016 News 1 CommentYou know, I think Karl Gallagher has been reading my stuff for almost as long as I’ve been writing it. So you’d maybe have a point if you were going to say that I’m maybe a little biased when it comes to assessing his work. But the thing is, it’s not just me that’s praising his […]
I wasn’t really going to touch on anime over here, but then I yakked about Robotech and Macross for more than a month and you guys seemed to respond well to it. So I’ve decided that touching on some other anime series might not go amiss, and now you’re all in for it. I will […]
This was my reaction to Columbia Games’s The Last Spike back in March: If entertaining non-gamers is something you end up doing a fair bit of, this a title you’ll want to add to your collection. For me, this is just the thing for situations when I’m short on time and want a solid gaming experience […]
This venerable game has a great deal of cachet– and not just from nostalgia, either. For one of these ancient Avalon Hill Bookcase Games, it gets a surprising amount of play out in the convention scene. A game that has held up under punishing tournament conditions this long has surely stood the test of time. Lucky […]