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Expansion time again...

 Plaid Hat done do'd it again.

Star Wars represents my third attempt at one of Fantasy Flight’s Living Card Games. My first was a copy of Game of Thrones that I scored in a math trade. I tried most of one two-player game, and it was not much to my taste at all. I found the strategy more daunting than the effort I was prepared to expend, and I’m not a big fan of the source material in the first place. So into the trade pile it went. Then I tried my hand at the very unusual Lord of the Rings card game. I’m a...

Why hello. Take a glass, and pull up a chair. Let me tell you about my week. On Thursday a box arrived containing a copy of Kingdom Builder, winner of the coveted 2012 Spiel des Jahres award. That night I slotted into my well-worn groove on the settee and got down to the job of removing shrinkwrap and popping cardboard. Sadly, and perhaps surprisingly, that task gets tiresome when you’ve done it as many times as I have. The components are functional, but pedestrian, little wooden houses and lots of brown modular board...

 In triplicate.

You voted, and the results are in--now, find out which games are walking away with the coveted F:AT 2012 READER'S CHOICE AWARDS! My tux is at the cleaners, so I hope this dingy bathrobe with little coffee cups on it will suffice.

This weekend, I watched Steven Soderbergh’s thriller from 2011, Contagion. I’m not entirely sure what I was suspecting, but I liked what I saw. I found it to be a clear-eyed portrayal of what a true global pandemic would look like, without apocolyptic overtones and overwrought doomsaying. It was simply about a very serious global scare and the aftermath, and that straightforward quality suited the subject matter well. In some ways, it felt more realistic and therefore more frightening. But the whole time, I was remembering back to the movie’s release, when my wife pestered me to go and...

 One does not play LOTR LCG with just the Core Set.

Licensed games based on well-known films or books are nothing new, and while of variable quality. generally rather better than their digital counterparts. But since its publication, the love for War of the Ring has been little short of astonishing. It’s not hard to see why. The biggest achievement of the game is to allow players to re-tell a plausible version of The Lord of the Rings on each play through whilst still enabling plenty of strategy and freedom of choice while doing so. When you consider how difficult that balance is to maintain, and how...

 This game is great and all...but REVENGANCE!