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“If you swing at junk, what’s that pitcher going to throw you?”

This picture makes me dizzy. Anyway, it must be dungeon crawl month here at F:AT because we've been talking about RAVENLOFT, DESCENT, DUNGEONQUEST, that terrible-looking game Loter went all Loter on, and we're already discussing WRATH OF ASHARDALON. All of this got me thinking more critically about DESCENT, and the breakout of anti-DESCENT sentiment in the ASHARDALON thread made me finally come to terms with a fact I've been dodging for a while. I really don't like DESCENT. Say all you want that it's fun with the right people or played a certain...

Given the importance of actually communicating with one another using words which have a shared mutual understanding, I remain amazed that the word "weight" remains in frequent board gaming parlance without having been split or somehow qualified into several different terms, because there are so many different ways of understanding it in relation to gaming. The problem is illustrated easily by the game Go: to me, Go is a heavy game because it demands intense concentration during play. To many other people (and this is illustrated by its weight rating on BGG) it's a light game because it has...

Pictured is Stanley Kubrick, the greatest director of all time. He wasn't just an auteur, he was the living embodiment of the term. He doesn't really have anything to do with gaming, but the auteur theory does. Pop quiz. Name the author of the last game you played. Was it EON? Corey Koniesczka? Jim Bailey? Rudiger Dorn? No matter who you name, you're wrong. The designer is undoubtedly an authorial impetus in the creation of game, but ultimately we are the authors of the games we play. Give yourself some credit. That's what...

Barnes mentioned something recently in the forums about either not liking or being tired of the "big boss" syndrome in games. It really struck home with me as it dawned on me that this is something I really, really like--and the notion of having a "boss" to fight often makes a game more enjoyable to me. It's exciting, and conducive to an emerging narrative. It gives players a goal, something to ramp up for, something to accomplish. Sure, it can be a tired, cliched device as well, as so many action movies feature a lead villain, a nefarious end...

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about team games. I mean "team" in its most literal sense. How many board game are there where you and another player truly share the win or loss through shared effort, without reservation or caveat? If you're talking cardboard the list is pretty doggone short. Nearly a quarter of a century ago I visited Historicon for a day, more to gawk at the beautiful miniatures than to engage in the gaming itself. As I was walking through the main room late in...

This week, I had an honest to god gaming light bulb moment. I was messing around with Magic Realm’s digital version, Realmspeak, for the 3rd time in a couple years. And it finally clicked. I can now safely Magic Realm is the most creative game I’ve ever played and maybe the best. There is not a single idea in it that is not original. That is why the game is so hard to grasp---because Hamblen approached every single question of design in the game unencumbered by other people's ideas about fantasy and...

Ever seen The Dead Poets Society? I bet most of you have. If not you should check it out sometime - it’s quite an emotionally manipulative film but it’s that rare thing: a really rather good emotionally manipulative film. But this shouldn’t concern us. What I want to highlight is that the film begins and ends with scenes based around an essay from an English Literature textbook. The essay suggests that if one were to draw a graph and make one axis “perfection” and the other “importance”, plotting the appropriate points for a given poem would yield an overall...

This week's Cracked LCD is one of those highbrow theory articles that I like to write every so often about the way I think games ought to be. I tried really hard to piss someone off in it by calling game designers fascists, but Bill Abner stepped in and judiciously excised that indictment. Rudiger Dorn and Andreas Seyfarth can rest easy, safe from Godwin's Law. So it's about transparency as Claude Rains (pictured) suggests. And by transparency, I mean rules and mechanics that vanish when you're actually playing a game. And why games where this happens are...

I’ve been waiting to play Conflict of Heroes for a long time. The idea of a relatively lightweight yet demanding World War 2 tactical game really got me excited and the only reason I didn’t dive in right away was because the historical background of the first game didn’t interest me much. I almost bought Storms of Steel but eventually passed on that because it looked like what I really wanted, a Normandy campaign iteration of the system, was coming up next. So until that time I was reliant on a friend getting a copy to try the game....