Articles > Rants & Raves

Vaping beats hell out of smoking, but there's a downside - battery life. I have three batteries and two chargers, and every now and then, I still find myself jonesing with no way to get a fix. So last night, I left the house at 11:45 and drove to the corner gas station to pick up a pack of Winstons. I don't care, really - if I smoke a pack every two weeks, I think I'm still doing pretty well. This isn't a story about smoking. It's a story about sad little men. Because the guy...

One thing that has often perplexed me about gaming culture generally is the attitude to cheats and, more specifically, to games where the set-up makes it very easy for cheats to prosper. Take Fury of Dracula for example: the original Games Workshop game made is really, really easy for the Dracula player to cheat and apparently players felt this was a poor aspect of the design. So much so that, as far as I can tell, when Fantasy Flight republished the game they put a lot of effort - and a lot of extra administration time and rules overhead...

I’m afraid that this weeks’ column is going to be rather less about board games and somewhat more personal than usual, hinging on issues that are only tangentially related to gaming. A clue to the nature of said issues is in the title. So if you’d rather not delve into the deeper realms of my psyche, or participate in discussions about morality, now is the time to click away. Don’t come whining to me if you get to the end of the piece and discover it’s not to your liking. When I was a small boy, I played with...

A recent news story from Rhode Island described an incident in a second grade classroom involving plastic army men. The students were making special hats to celebrate an event and one 8 year old boy created a baseball cap with a patriotic theme. The hat was decorated with an American flag and some green toy soldiers. The child was referred for disciplinary procedures because the plastic soldiers were carrying guns. Thankfully a school administrator with some faintly pulsing thinking skills remaining in his or her cranium stepped in to defuse the situation, but only after the...

So it's E3 week, so Bill Abner and crew are all out at E3. Next year, I'm going to try to join them but for now it means that there's no Cracked LCD for this week. Next week, we're doing the first-ever published BATTLES OF WESTEROS review and the week after that will be my love letter to Small Box Games. I've got an interview with Jim Bailey of Grindhouse Games in the works along with reviews for a couple of Victory Point Games and maybe I'll finally get around to writing up HORUS HERESY after that. But oh,...

I have a review already written for tonight. It's pretty good, too, with plenty of crude, base humor and some truly tasteless nods to cultural insensitivity. I actually had it ready to post last night, and then something happened. Wizards changed the HeroScape bases.

I recently got involved in a pretty heated debate over a list of perceived grievances about hobby gaming posted by one Michael Barnes. Whether you agree with his arguments or not it the list itself makes interesting reading, written as it is with the authors’ usual style and panache, and the discussion that follows is lengthy and peppered with personal abuse but is even more interesting to my mind. I don’t intend to go over that ground again here - that would be pointless since you can read the discussion if you want to know my...

I doubt it will have the earth shattering impact of "Top Ten Games Every Gamer Should Own", but I'm hoping that this week's Cracked LCD Countdown manages to at least take out a few major metropolitan areas. I wanted to go through and lay out my ten biggest grievances about hobby gaming, the industry, and the community. I "bitch" a lot, but it's because I think we can do better. "We" meaning everyone involved in hobby games at every level. Sorry, I'm not just not one of these people who thinks that as long as there's...

When a recent forum discussion turned to game prices Michael Barnes made an interesting comment about the customer base for expensive games… specifically those titles in the $80+ price range. Mr. Barnes presented a relatively accurate analysis of the marketplace and then mentioned the impact of the “… middle-aged man with a credit card that’s able to buy $100 board games with impunity.” Mr. Barnes correctly described this type of customer -- I should know because I am one of those middle-aged guys who has the ability to purchase board games with little regard to the cost. ...

A while ago I had the pleasure of reviewing The Hell of Stalingrad by Clash of Arms games. If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, I’ll give you a free pass to the end of the column where I concluded that it was a pretty good and very innovative game that was unfortunately let down by some pretty rough edges, and that it promised to be a fantastic base for future iterations of the series. Well, having not had the chance to play the game in a while I was struck by the desire...