Free-range thoughts about design, writing, and play
When Stonemaier Games announced Apiary, its new worker placement game about futuristic bees in space, I was all over it. I loved the theme, the highly paintable queen bee miniature, and the prospect of a flexible worker placement system. I’ve had a couple of chances to play the game since it arrived, and Apiary delivers…
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Stationfall, the “party game for hardcore gamers” in which you play several members of a wacky cast of misfits running around a crashing space station. Honestly, this game pretty much had me at “hello”. The rules get a little complicated, but bear with me as I summarize….
I’ve played a bunch of good analog and digital games over the last year — Slay the Spire is particularly notable — but the last few weeks have been eaten by the critical darling of 2020: Hades. If you’ve paid any attention to critics’ best of the year lists, you’ve heard about Hades. Heck, this…
So, it’s been a few months. Anything interesting happening in the world? I’ve been busy with some things, and one of them is marveling at Slay the Spire. Trading card games and deck builders are a big part of my gaming history. I played and sold them in the 1990s, drifted away from them in…
The app version of Evolution is out from North Star Games, and I should be delighted. It’s a strong adaptation of my second favorite game — so what went wrong?
Battle royale games have shown an outrageous ability to draw in players over the last year, and I’ve been keeping a close eye on them. I’m not much for shooters, though, so Nintendo’s Tetris 99 is my first direct exposure to the mode. It’s a hell of an experience.
One of my favorite Finnish phrases is sopii kuin nyrkki silmään: “fits like a fist to the eye”. It’s a pungent way to say that something “fits well”, and it’s an apt description for how the recent mobile version of Lemmings handles energy.
I liked Alphabear. It had a few flaws, but the game was good and it had plenty of charm. So I was looking forward to Alphabear 2. The sequel has some nice improvements, so why do I like it less?
You’d think the Roman empire was falling all over again. The new edition of Hisashi Hayashi’s Minerva has shipped, and its backers are up in arms. What went wrong?
Last night I stayed up too late finishing Torment: Tides of Numenera. The ending is worth the lost sleep, but the narrative left me and my character in the same place: conflicted and wondering about what we had done.