Articles > Rants & Raves

That's right, it's time once again for the monthly Cracked LCD Countdown. And this one is really going to piss off you people who are totally OK with spending $100 on a board game. Because it's about being cheap, but smartly cheap. It's about games that you can buy for under thirty dollars are that are great. Somewhere along the way, the AT idea got mixed up with this crazy notion that games have to be outrageously overproduced in order to be good. That a game has to have piles of miniatures and streams of flavor text to be...

I like Battlestar Galactica and yet I have found myself largely unable to join in the seemingly endless torrent of love and praise that it has garnered during the short eighteen months that it has been in existence. I’ve had a lot of fun playing it and yet it seems that each and every time I sit down to that board (and I’ve never yet been dealt as a Cylon), and set about passing those skill checks, there’s something strange niggling at the back of my head. “There’s something wrong here” it seems to be saying,...

This week at Gameshark I'm talking about those other hobby games, but more specifically why I don't talk about them much. Miniatures and RPGs are almost completely a non-interest for me at this point in my life, and as such I almost never cover them unless it's something like SPACE HULK or a prepainted thing where you have an actual board and you don't have to get involved in that nerd version of model railroading, terrain building. No, I don't give a rat's ass about painting miniatures anymore nor do I want to spend an evening talking like an...

Last month's Cracked LCD Countdown was one of the most popular and beloved board game article to ever appear on the internet. I am positive that sales of all of the listed games surged over the past couple of weeks as poser board gamers everywhere scrambled to accede to my tastes and opinions. Did you buy your copy of RISK yet? So this week it's time for an all-new Cracked LCD Countdown, and I think this list might do to the hobby gaming community what The Count is doing to poor old Edward in this picture-...

Back in 1994-95 two very influential board games came out on the market.   In Europe, Klaus Teuber designed Settlers of Catan and in the United States, Mark Herman designed We the People for Avalon Hill.

The majority of games I play are with 2 - 5 players, but every once in while I'm in a situation where we have 8 or more people who want to play a game together. Sometimes this is at cons or when people have traveled a long distances to play some games together. Sometimes this could be when family gets together, and Aunt Betty or your nephew Melvin says, "Hey do have a game that 10 people, from an 8 year old to an 80 year can...

I have an amazingly poor record when it comes to finding bargain copies of games in charity shops. But about this time last year I came close - I found copies of Civilization and Kingmaker in my local charity shop. I didn’t buy either, the former being one very long game too many and the latter being something I already own. But what was particularly interesting about this experience was that both games were ones that any gamer worth his or her salt would recognise as being classic titles which are heavyweights in terms of both complexity and strategy,...

Around this time of year, for the past few years, I’ve made a habit of listing a top fifty games according to the boardgamegeek ratings of people who hold the “ameritrash” microbadge. The idea originally was to get a better handle on what, exactly, the term was supposed to describe but as time has gone on it’s become more of a matter of interest onto itself, simply to recommend the best games to fans of the genre, even as the term itself has, perhaps, become even more ephemeral. This year, due to time constraints I’m barely able...

Here they are, fashionably late and probably not very surprising- your Cracked LCD Games of the Year for 2009. Pictured at left is a man eating a giant hamburger. It has nothing to do with this article. It came up on a Google image search for "Warhammer Trophy". I was looking for an appropriate image to celebrate this year's Game of the Year award recipient and this appeared. Note to Mr. Eric Lang- your giant Cracked LCD Game of the Year commemorative hamburger was shipped Parcel Post this morning.

Thanks almost entirely to the existence of Fortress:Ameritrash and my ongoing need to fill column inches therein, 2009 has been the first year of my entire life during which I've played enough of the new releases for the year to actually do an annual review. It is unfortunate therefore that in terms of new releases 2009 has been a pretty poor year all round. Indeed if it wasn't for the last three months it'd be pretty much a write off. Maybe it was the hangover of so many great releases at the end of 2008, or perhaps a combination...