Blog Archives

This is right now the most interesting discussion happening in tabletop gaming. First off, Raging Owlbear opens up with a humdinger of a blog post. It’s about a deceptively simple situation: do you let someone in a recent edition of D&D alter the racial bonuses for their elf or not? The Owlbear comes down hard […]

What would you do if you had a space game that could play out small engagements in an hour and larger fleet battles in two…? Why, you’d play bigger, more monsterific scenarios that you’d never dreamed you would actually try, of course. And this is the big one. Fortunately, every scenario leading up to this […]

Two hours. TWO HOURS. This one’s a giant fleet battle. Okay, not a monster fleet battle. But bigger than what I would tend to spontaneously set up for Star Fleet Battles or even Federation Commander. The Terrans have four ships and the Talon have five. Nobody is running anything smaller than a light cruiser. No […]

I finally got to play Call of Cthulhu. 7th edition. Six players. I dropped in on the second session of a continuing adventure. And if I caught it right, the Keeper was brand new at running games. I was surprised at how well it worked. There were moments where everyone was struggling, but the strength […]

Solitaire gamebooks. Love role-playing games like nothing else, but don’t have a game group or else don’t know how to game master…? Yeah, that was me for a long time. I’ve played scads of the things. What makes for a good one? They have a unique set of constraints. On the one hand, the illusion […]

This is another of those standard space wargame scenarios that I always dreamed of playing back when I was a high school aged kid with a brand new copy of Star Fleet Battles. To tell you the truth, the vast majority of games would have been either starship duels or else over the top “battle […]

Okay, this is a really great show. I find it absolutely fascinating how people can have such completely different understandings of role-playing games even when they’re are more or less working from the same reference points. Getting these sorts of perspectives side by side and in conversation with each other is awesome. One funny bit, though: […]

This is a very large game. It positively exudes gravitas. It’s among the most revered and most talked about rpgs of all time. The people with epic stories of awesome game sessions that came out of playing this system are legion. This is not something I’m just going to spontaneously pick up and run with, so I’m […]

This is the big one. There’s five ships to a side in this one. The Terrans have a total of seven hard hitting anti-matter torpedoes on their ships. The Talon have not only five seeking weapons on their ships and countless disruptors, but also the awesome “space shotgun” that is the fusion canon. Now… if every […]

This is our seventh scenario with the game and it’s still the #1 game on our shelves. (So many awesome games gathering dust… because of Talon!) This is the first one that I didn’t really care for and I’ll get to why in a second. First, though… I’ve got to say, this game gets so […]