Board Game Review - Capital Offensive

I used to start every day by reading through my daily dose of web comics. Most of them were just for the sake of the joke, but my favorite was a story-based daily called Schlock Mercenary. The art was weak, but the stories were great, the characters were interesting, and the dialog was outstanding. It was about a roving band of space mercs, focusing in particular on a green goo alien named Schlock who shot things with a plasma cannon and ate a lot...

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Card Game Review - Down In Flames: Guns Blazing

We need to start a campaign to stop ugly games. We'll have an online petition and send letters to our state representatives. The petition will be something like, 'We hereby do swear to talk like lawyers as we ask for a law that will make people stop producing ugly games.' This is necessary because there are just too many ugly games out there, and some of them might be fun, except for they are so darn ugly.Case in point - Down In Flames. It's a card...

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Holiday Report - Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Hopefully you got stuck at a relative's house after a really long, exhausting drive, then got to eat tons of overcooked, dry turkey and listen to your cousins fights over whether Obama is actually from Kenya. My Thanksgiving was WAY better than that, mostly because we had it at home and nobody came over. That's not entirely accurate, actually. My daughter did have a friend over, so I shared my dry-ass Thanksgiving turkey with two giggling, insipid sixteen-year-old twits. Then, after dinner, this little girl...

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Movie Review - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Ask the average American what the Civil War was about, and they might tell you slavery. Some (especially throwback rednecks who think the South should rise again, as if that would be anything other than completely disastrous) might tell you it was just about Northern Aggression. Ask a tweed-jockey academic, he might just tell you all about how it was about the rise of industrialism and the decline of agrarianism. But they're all wrong - it was about...

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Board Game Review - Archipelago

Asmodee understands that theme is important for gamers. That's why, when they make a game, they use the same exact theme for every fourth game. Settling the New World from Europe may have been done about seven hundred times, but people keep buying it, so it must still be popular.Archipelago is a game about settling a bunch of islands in the middle of the Caribbean. It covers a wide span of time - each turn is supposed to be about fifteen years, which...

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Comic Book Review - Chew

I'm at BGG Con all week. Yeah, I know, but I'm working for Asmodee. The con is twenty minutes from my house and I'm getting a paycheck, so what the hell, I'll show up. Happily, my boss has made me a badge that tells the world my name is 'Asmo Dude,' so I can go undercover. It's very sneaky. Once again, I find myself grateful that I don't do video reviews - in this case, because none of the people I have called unrepentant tools know what I look like.Anyway,...

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Rant - Screw Your FLGS

'Friendly Local Game Store.' Like your local game store is Spider-Man. Man, I get sick of hearing that. And abbreviating it 'FLGS', like that will make it all cute, is even worse.I've been in some game stores that I really loved. There was one in Orlando called Enterprise 1701, and they had old D&D books out the wazoo. This was back when I played D&D with my wife on a near-daily basis, after we had our first kid but before he got old enough to be a pain in the ass. I freaking loved that store. They've moved, and now they're called Sci-Fi...

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Board Game Review - Thunderbolt Apache Leader

 This here is another review by my dad, who I call Dad, and you may call Mister Drake.A bit of autobiographical background.  I walked out of a college class in 1967 to join the army.  I hated the boring classes so I decided to go for some excitement in life (I’d grown up in the country chasing cows and horses and shoveling, well, you know) and so enlisted airborne.  (Ah, the impetuosity of youth!)  But at the end of basic...

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Book Review - World War Z

Just a few days ago, I was talking about how zombies are on the upswing, and I mentioned a book called World War Z. It sprang to mind then because I had just finished reading it. It's very good. It's worth its own review. So here it is. The review.World War Z is a unique piece of zombie fiction. Rather than following the tried-and-true storytelling gimmick of following a small band of hardened survivors, World War Z relates the entire history of...

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Observation - Rise of the Dead

Remakes of classic old movies are not a big deal any more, except when they resonate with us on a personal level. The remade Star Trek was cool, but it was better for those of us who watched William Shatner before he was a tubby, tiny, gray-haired old man. Remade Superman, remade Dredd, remade Evil Dead - and those are just recent past and near future. So Red Dawn shouldn't be especially impressive, because it's just another remake.The interesting thing, though, is that the original Red Dawn was created when we were all half-certain that we were...

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Abstract Game Review - Serpent Stone

I know, you're all amazed. You're saying, 'holy crap, it's a game review! At this game review website! What will they think of next? Cheese on a cheese sandwich? Is there no end to the insanity?'Saturday afternoon, after I got out of my web design class (which, by machinations of devils and bureaucrats, consumes Saturday mornings for three months running), I got to play a game I have not reviewed yet. It's called Serpent Stone, and it was with a...

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Nothing Review - Not Doing Anything

The toughest thing about trying to update three times a week is that sometimes I run out of stuff to write about. Want to hear about what I had for lunch? Should I review the egg & cheese on flatbread you can get at Subway? How about my wife's recipe for bolognese?No? It's just as well. I don't actually have that recipe.OK, how about I review working in a cubicle farm. I could tell you all about gray fabric and painfully fluorescent lights. That would be fun, right? I could complain about my boss, maybe share something that nobody else is experiencing...

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