Preview - Mice & Mystics

I am one lucky son of a bitch, and you are not. Unless you recently won the lottery or nailed Jessica Alba or something, and then you might also be lucky. Or if the woman you love just agreed to marry you, and you said, 'I'm the luckiest man in the world!', which is not actually true because the same thing happens to guys all over the world, like, every day. Come to think of it, there are a lot of reasons someone might be a lucky bastard. Many of...

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Board Game Review - Wiz War

A long time ago (well, it feels long to me), when my wife and I were kind of broke and lived in a crappy house in the country because the rent was low, we used to play a lot of games. It's a shockingly affordable form of entertainment, especially if you play the same game a bunch of times and don't feel a need to buy new games all the time. We played a ridiculous amount of D&D, which was funny because before she married me, she wouldn't have...

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Board Game Review - Road Kill Rally

Every once in a great while, someone invents a game, and it seems like they made it just for me. Like, they handed out surveys, and based only on my personal response, designed a game tailor-made for me. Road Kill Rally is one of those games, and this is what that survey would have looked like:Dear respondent,We are making a racing game, and would like to know what you want to see. Please mark your choices with an X.1. Do you want to see:o Lots of...

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Card Game Review - Zombies!

By now, I think we can all agree that the zombie game phenomenon is getting a little old. Every third game seems to be about either killing the undead, running from the undead, or becoming the undead so you can eat other people. It's an epidemic, and I'm pretty sure people are going to start getting tired of it very soon.Apparently, Russia did not get the memo.Russian Boardgames, a company whose name is only half-way accurate, has been responsible...

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Mental Game Review - Divinare

Divinare is a game about being psychic, where you try to figure out how many of each card will be played. It reminds me a lot of another game I play a lot, where I try to guess what my wife actually means when she is saying stuff to me. I suck at that game, because I am neither psychic nor particularly good at interpreting subtle clues that would be obvious to a woman and completely lost on a man.In Divinare, you're all pretending to be seers who...

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Board Game Review - Ascending Empires

Sometimes, when I am looking for inspiration to write a game review that will make people laugh, I go to Dave Barry's website and read some of his old columns. They make me chortle, possibly guffaw, and then I am usually prepared to write something that will be, if not outright funny, at least amusing.Today, that did not work. I am reviewing a game called Ascending Empires, and I cannot for the life of me think of a gut-busting way to start, despite...

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Dice Game Review - Quarriors

Tonight's review is like the guy who just discovered AC/DC and wants to tell everyone about it, except that everyone else has been listening to AC/DC since the 70s and they already know that Bon Scott was a better lead singer than Brian Johnson, and yet Back in Black was still an indisputably awesome album, especially the B-side. Because, see, I just played Quarriors this weekend, and pretty much everyone else has already played it, but I'm all excited...

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Toy Review - Kre-o Battleship

The same press kit that sent me Classic Battleship also gave me two incredibly cool Kre-o sets. For those unfamiliar (which would include me, until this press kit showed up), Kre-o is what Hasbro calls their Lego clones. The pieces all work with Legos, which means they should also work with MegaBlox, except that MegaBlox sucks hot summer ass. Sure, it's half as much, but that's because it's less than half as awesome. Except maybe the Halo MegaBlox...

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Board Game Review - Classic Battleship Movie Edition

I have almost no gaming nostalgia. I liked Candyland when I was a tyke, but I don't want to play it now. I enjoyed playing Blitzkrieg with my old man when I was in junior high, and would not like to reenact the experience today. I used to love jumping in mud puddles when I was a youngster… OK, bad example, I totally love jumping in mud puddles. Only now I can't do it, because I'll just ruin a pair of khakis and a nice oxford.Battleship is an exception....

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Board Game Review - Middle Earth Quest

Remember right after the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and every fourth board game that came out was all about the movies? And you would use worker placement or roll-and-move or cooperative puzzle games to reenact the adventures of Legolas and Pippin and Gimli and that kid from Goonies. After a while, the trend faded out and was replaced by an unexplainable deluge of zombie games, but I still remember how many times I played yet another Lord...

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Not A Real Update - Cool Thing

I swear, Drake's Flames is not a Tumblr feed. But I ran across a photo blog I thought was fantastic, and wanted to share it real quick.http://www.photocurios.co.uk/The site is all pictures of cool stuff in England. Interesting signs, fog-choked landmarks, and other cool photos are matched with descriptors that let you explore the UK without having to actually visit. It's been going for a couple years, so there are plenty of neat images. I would consider it worth enough time to at least give it a gander.And since this is not a real update, I'll...

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Paranoid Game Review - The Resistance

I know a lot of people really like the Battlestar Galactica board game, and they should, because it is really fun. It's a cooperative game where you're trying to save the human race, unless you're one of those traitorous Cylons who look just like human beings and are trying to kill off the remaining meat puppets. Those pesky traitors make the whole game into a maddening and exhilarating exercise in paranoia, wild conjecture, and unbased accusation.I...

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Other Stuff To Read

They say that no man is an island, and I tend to think that's good, especially when I've been to the beach and have a bunch of sand in my shorts. That really chafes, and if I were a whole island, I would probably never get rid of the sand in my private spots, and I would get a terrible rash. On the other hand, if the island were big enough, like Hawaii or something, I could get hot surfer girls to ride waves on the reefs off my coast.Actually, that's just not feasible. If I were that large, my obesity would make it difficult to enjoy the surfer...

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