Blog Archives

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 […]

Last week, I touched on why it’s so hard to carry on a substantative discussion about RPGs. Thanks to a marvelous synchronicity, Zak S. was ruminating on that at almost exactly the same time as I was. (There must be something in the air!) So really… why is it so danged hard to actually talk about RPGs? I’ve […]

Charles Akins had an interesting post on an rpg campaign that fell apart. Here’s what happened: Last night I was reading Twitter, as one does, when I ran across one of the role-players in my feed talking about the game he was running. Apparently he was under the impression that the game he was running […]

Role-players are a tough crowd. If you make a strongly worded claim about the medium, someone will surely point out that it’s a-okay for other tables to do things differently with just as good results… for them. If you post a negative review of a gaming product, someone will comment with how it was the […]

I’ve run a marathon role-playing session at the local convention nearly every year this past while. It’s been a great way to not only learn to game master, but also to meet the sort of people in my area that are willing to play in the sort of continuing campaigns that I could only dream […]

If trends in game design are moving toward getting more with less, The Last Spike would be a case in point. It doesn’t even take five minutes to explain the rules. Playing time clocks in at well short of an hour. And even though this is a strong candidate for the new “go-to” gateway game in […]

PrezCon has officially started. If are interested in tabletop games and you are anywhere near the Charlottesville, Virginia area, you will want to check this out. This is from the opening heat of the Tikal tournament: Here’s a couple of guys learning a new one from Columbia Games, The Last Spike:

Anybody following Blog Watch, Sensor Sweep, or my Top Gaming Blog posts from 2014 and 2015 will know that some of the best blogging on the internet is done by guys that design for and comment on the GURPS role-playing system. It always seemed like one of the internet’s better kept secrets to me, but that’s […]

Hans-Christian Vortisch has started blogging– and if you are any shade of gun nut, his site will blow you away. This post on H. P. Lovecraft’s guns is fascinating even if it’s patently obvious that the man wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes in a Call of Cthulhu game. And this in depth piece on the Heckler & […]