Blog Archives

Jeffro: I have spent a great deal of time the past six months investigating the Appendix N list to find out how to (among other things) use it to rejuvenate classic D&D by going back to its original sources. But in your case… when these games were relatively new, it was your familiarity with the literature that proved […]

I admit, I have a very difficult time being objective about this game. It was the first hobby game I ever bought way back when I was in the fourth grade and I just haven’t gotten over it even to this day. It quickly became a monster hit and I wasn’t the only one that played it […]

Before I review this work, I have to be up front about the fact that I am not the target audience of this sort of product. I am perfectly happy playing vintage role-playing games like Classic Traveller, Moldvay Basic D&D, and Car Wars. I am simply not looking for a replacement for those games and […]

This book is a monster. Clocking in at over four hundred pages, it has everything you’d need for a long-running campaign: background, history, game-mastering advice, a stocked wilderness area, a fully described “Keep on the Borderlands” type of base for the players to use, new spells, new monsters, new magic items, and one of the biggest […]

I was really curious how things would go when my reviews of Space Empires: 4X and its Close Encounters expansion went up on Board Game Geek. It’s been a while since I was over there much and while it’s cool that the game’s designer hangs out over there, I admit I kind of dreaded seeing all […]

This is an expansion to what is one of the best space games on the market. It is positively loaded with new ships and technologies and the counter sheets are gorgeous. Given that everything in this set is designed to tune and develop aspects of the original game, the new rules and additions can be viewed as […]

The funny thing about this game is that, in many ways, it’s one that I’ve already been playing for years. It takes the Basic and Expert D&D sets of my youth as a starting point and then develops from there. I’ve said before, those sets are the purest, most refined, best designed iteration of the original […]

GMT Games and designer Jim Krohn have put together what is quite simply the best space game on the market. Okay, not everyone has come around to seeing it that way yet, but really… the game’s critics have to agree that all four “exes” are in evidence here and none of them get the short end […]

Just looking at the earliest rule books it’s hard to imagine how role playing games really took hold like they did. Many of the first wave of products were nigh inscrutable, poorly edited, and amateurishly illustrated. Sure, what they lacked in polish they more than made up in charm. And as S. John Ross’s Encounter Critical demonstrates, […]