Announcement - Esoteric Order of Gamers

Many of you are probably aware of Universal Head. In case you're not, let me set the record straight - his screen name is NOT a reference to one-size-fits-all fellatio. He's Australian. I'm not even sure they call it that there.Universal Head is my favorite Australian, a guy who tirelessly goes through crappy, poorly written rules and turns out hundreds of summaries that are both easier to understand and better laid out than the originals. He's a...

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Movie Review - Django Unchained

If you read this blog often enough to know much about me at all, it should require almost no effort to figure out if I liked Django Unchained. If you know me at all, you probably would guess that when Quentin Tarantino makes a western about a black bounty hunter who kills, like, everybody, I would like that movie. And if you did guess that, you would be right.However, it might come as a surprise that despite enjoying the ever-loving bear crap out...

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Board Game Review - Lord of the Rings

If you're a fan of Reiner Knizia's games, then one of two things is true. Either A) you have a well-developed sense of humor, or B) you don't read Drake's Flames. Reiner is my Numero-Uno, go-to guy when I need a game designer to mock, and I know that over the years, I have lost readers who really love the guy.This review is going to cost me a few more.Many of my readers may have heard of a trilogy of movies that came out in the first few years of...

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TV Show Review - Orphan Black

For the sake of establishing a baseline, here are some shows I do not like:Doctor Who (any incarnation)Being Human (British or American)TorchwoodAnd here are some shows I DO like:JekyllSherlock (the one with Benedict Cumberpatch)LutherIf you're a savvy TV nerd like myself, you might notice that all these shows have one thing in common - BBC America. Or, if you're in England, just BBC, because if you were in England watching BBC America, you would...

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Deckbuilding Game Review - Arctic Scavengers

Remember right after Dominion came out, and there were no other deckbuilding games in the whole wide world, and everybody was like, 'holy cow, can you believe how cool this game is?' That was before Thunderstone and Nightfall and Rune Age and Eminent Domain and Marvel and DC and all those other deckbuilding games that came out because deckbuilding is actually a pretty awesome game mechanic. And so when Arctic Scavengers came out, and was pretty much...

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Card Game Review - Guildhall

Some day I'm going to write an article about the psychology of board games. And one thing that I'm definitely going to discuss is whether size matters when we're talking about the box (I encourage all of you to quote that out of context). If you put your game into a bigger box, does it make it more valuable? For many gamers, that's a definite yes.For instance, Guildhall is basically three or four decks of cards and a handful of cardboard tokens....

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Board Game Review in Song Form - Zoneplex

Picture yourself in a pyramid templewith triangle rooms you build on the fly.Randomly place some rooms in the Zoneplexand then move your monk to the eye.Bright-colored monsters of pink, blue and greenmanifest out of your head.Team up with allies to take down the fearsand you'll win.Warrior monks fight space fears in Zoneplex.Warrior monks fight space fears in Zoneplex.Warrior monks fight space fears in Zoneplex.Floating in space, the pyramid templewhere...

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Comic Book Review - Planetoid

I love a good sci-fi comic, especially if there are no over-sexed dames in skin-tight leotards who can shoot fire from their nipples. Science fiction is such a great genre for comic books, because it's difficult to describe some of the crazy stuff you see in standard written fiction. Planetoid sounded cool because it was a sci-fi book from Image, which makes it kind of a double-whammy of sweetness. Sure, Image published Youngblood, but they also...

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Tile Game Review - Battl Khaos

Sometimes I like to think that games are created when people are presented with interesting design challenges. Someone comes along and says, 'hey, make a game where you combine addition and mermaids, only make it boring,' and you get Atlanteon, one of my least favorite games of all time.And if you got this design brief:"Make it like Carcassonne, because that game is a pretty big deal, only make it about war, because war is awesome. Only we still...

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Cartoon Review - Adventure Time

When I was in high school, I became thoroughly fascinated with Thundercats. It was exciting and creative and ridiculously cool. In fact, the first comic book I ever drew was a two-page short where that weird monkey guy attacked the blue puma dude and got his ass beat with nunchucks. I mean, I loved that show.My parents thought I was insane. I was a 16-year-old kid who could not quit watching a child's cartoon. My dad, a veteran of Vietnam, an avid outdoorsman and a thoroughly bad-ass dude, probably wept to see his oldest son wasting so much time...

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Card Game Review - Shadowrift

I know deckbuilding games are a fad. I know people are getting tired of them. I know how many people love to say, 'oh, great, another deckbuilder, yawn.' They actually say that. Or type it, anyway. They type 'yawn' as its own sentence. So condescending. I hope those people break their pelvises in skiing accidents.Because I don't care if deckbuilding is a fad, I think it's brilliant, and I love a good deckbuilding game. So when I read that Shadowrift...

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Card Game Review - Ghost Pirates

Everybody knows that the best kinds of pirates are ghost pirates. They still have peg-legs and eyepatches and parrots, and they still say 'arr' all the time, but they also have cool curses where they look gross in the moonlight or bullets can't kill them or whatever. In a contest between ghost pirates and anyone else, the outcome depends entirely on who they're fighting. I mean, what if they're fighting Cthulhu or something? He would just eat their...

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