In 2018, Games Workshop released the Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress. A combination between a dungeon crawl, a roleplaying game, and a wargame, Blackstone Fortress is a campaign-based game with varied mechanics and an emerging storyline. I bought the game 4 years after its release, and it's...
Monkey Palace is a board game by Lego about building stairs to the monkey palace, and it combines the innate fun of building Lego with clever board game mechanics that include resource management and board strategy. It's not just a Lego set, it's a legitimately well-designed board game that exercis...
I recently saw the movie The Blackening (2022), and these are my notes about it. This isn't a review, it's just so I remember what the movie was about, because my memory is just terrible (or my brain is too busy, or both?) This post does contain spoilers. Cutting to the chase: The Blackening is...
I've been running dnd for a long time. The number of times I've asked a female player what class she'd like to play and she's answered "witch" is not insignificant. For a long while, this was solved pretty easily by just using Pathfinder, which I appreciated because it was a great excuse to run Path...
Games Workshop re-released the first edition (titled Rogue Trader) of Warhammer 40,000 to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. (I'm not sure about their maths. The book was released in 1987, and the re-release was announced in 2023 and shipped to customers in 2024.) What little nostalgia I hav...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 13: Not at home.
This review contains spoilers....
Every time I play a complex board game, I think about crafting an organiser tray for all the game pieces. This imagined tray would have compartments for cards of varying sizes, tokens, dice, and so on, for several player characters, to help me manage and preserve the state of an ongoing game. A lot...
For the past year, I've been running Tales of the Valiant (ToV) for my local gaming group's weekly game session. The campaign started with Princes of the Apocalypse but after several side quests, the players have become thoroughly distracted and it's now a mix of Princes, Saltmarsh, and random K...
A year after purchasing the Imperium Maledictum RPG rulebook, I had the chance to run the Chemical Burn adventure at the Kapcon gaming convention in Wellington. Then I ran it a second time with one of my weekly gaming groups. This is my review of the module, with no spoilers until the appropriat...
In the third battle report of the Tran'Lo Tribute campaign, the Adeptus Mechanicus team plundered the archeotech vault of the heretical Vo family. When the emerge from the tunnels, however, they find that the city they just left behind is already in ruins. It seems that once they understood they...
I'm playing through all the Mansions of Madness scenarios I own, and reviewing each one as I go. Vengeful Impulses is part of the Beyond the Threshold expansion, and it's rated 2 stars difficulty (the lowest for any scenario I've seen so far). This review contains spoilers.
The premise of th...
I love a good solo or co-op game, but I also happen to play a few board games with programmed "game masters". Sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a deck of cards (as with Fallout the Board Game), and sometimes it's an app (as with Mansions of Madness). When something's programmed, it's essen...
I'm watching the Kill Lupercal animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review of it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
There are apparently 3 episodes in this series, so this episode is a full third of the series and I have...
In an effort to keep better track of what movies I've seen, I'm taking notes on what I watch. This post contains some major spoilers about The Mummy (1932). The short version of the post is this: It's an OK movie, but mostly because it's historical and it still amazes me that we can see and hear p...
I've been building a Vindicare Assassin for Warhammer 40,000. I have the rules for Assassins in the Imperial Agents 10th edition codex book, but by chance I saw the 3rd edition Assassins codex at a second-hand bookshop. It's only 12 pages long, so I picked it up, and this is my review of it.
W...
When you hear the term "wargame", you probably think "big" because a war is big. It's not a skirmish, it's not a battle, it's not an operation or a sting or astrike, it's a war. Because a war is big, there's a general admiration and excitement in the wargaming community for an expansive game board...