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Readers who have met me in real life know that I live for social interaction in games. It doesn’t even need to be an element of the mechanics, just present at the table in some form. If you’re the table that’s laughing and cutting up, that’s where I want to be. So I didn’t understand why so many gamers were so taken with playing games solo. On some level it defeats the entire purpose of playing games, which is to spend time with friends.

Wait, before you go any further- go read Alexander Awesome's interview with Bruno Cathala about Cyclades...it ties into my article this week in a way. I bumped off the top spot, but y'all need to go check it out. Second expansion, what?

I learned The Settlers of Catan from a college friend of mine, who explained it without glancing at the rules. We had a ball and played most of my senior year. It was only after I’d played some 25-30 games that I bothered to check the rules for myself, and discovered that he had taught us wrong on a couple points. For one thing, he didn’t use the alphabetical order for placing the numbers on the board. We just put out the numbers and tried to break up any adjacent red spots. But the rule that had a much...

I don’t like rating games, video or board. A good review should manage to encapsulate how you feel about a game without stamping a score at the bottom. Numeric ratings attract attention away from the writing, and have neither the subtlety or nuance to express wider ideas about the value of the game beyond its play, or the reviewer’s tilt. But I don’t always have the pleasure of writing just as I’d like to, and many of the editors I’ve worked for want scores. Out of five, ten or, worst of...

Upon reading Michael Barnes’s recent review of Exodus: Proxima Centauri, I felt a creeping weariness set into my mind. Not because of the review itself, since it was up to his usual high standard. Rather, I felt myself resigned to the fact that there could very well be a new 4X space game on the market, one that occupies a similar space to the very epic Twilight Imperium, and 2011?s more streamlined Eclipse. For the second time in less than 18 months, there’s a new epic space game that is apparently really good. And that can only mean that people will...

When you love an artist, it’s a wonderful pleasure to slowly work your way through their catalogue,filtering it all through the twin lenses of your own passion and hindsight and charting in your head how they evolved over the course of their career. It’s as true of musicians and directors as it is of painters and sculptors. You’ll linger lovingly over your favourites of course, but the big picture and evolution are what’s really important.Only recently have we been able to do the same thing for video games, now that the design and programming titans of our youth are...

It is the sworn duty of every board game writer to come up with a “best of” article at the end of every year. This is carved in stone, from the beginning of the internet. I’m curious sometimes what would happen if someone were to NOT give their year-in-review article. I suspect that the internet would proceed as it always has, but I worry there’s a slim chance it sends us plummeting to a fiery death. I think it might be better not to risk it.

And so we come, without due ceremony, to the last of my yearly writing traditions: the top-rated games of people who hold the “Ameritrash fan” badge on boardgamegeek. The rules, as ever, are that a game must have at least 30 ratings from amongst the 814 people that own the badge, only base games count, only the highest entry from a series or multiple editions of a game count, and the results are ordered by average rating first, number of raters second.You may recall that last year, the fifth anniversary of the list, I inaugurated a new tradition: silver...

The first hobby game that I learned to play was The Settlers of Catan, which I got into just prior to my senior year of college. Needless to say, it was a big hit with me and my friends, but we had a very real problem with the game: it only played four people. Imagine our delight when we discovered that there was a way to expand the number of players who could be accommodated by a small box with extra components to let two more people play. We played so much that it’s a miracle we graduated at...

I seem to have fallen into an end-year pattern when it comes to writing: I close the year with a best-of list and open the new one with a rundown of what I’ve been playing and what I hope to play in the coming months. Dull, but comforting, like lexical porridge. This year I’m going to open the writing with something a little different, a little more personal and talk not just about games but about writing.I think I learned more about games writing this year than any of the other five that I’ve been doing it for. It’s...