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 You will believe a Rancor can punch an X-Wing

It’s not uncommon for a game to be  rejiggered into a slightly different form, which sounds like a bad thing. But it can often lead to a game that is much-improved, or at least excellent in its own way. In the past few years, games like Small World, Imperial 2030, and 1989 have taken systems established by old games and made them into something fresh. They may be recognizable, but they have much to recommend them on their own. It was with this optimism that I approached Carl Chudyk’s Uchronia. 

Yes, this is a Very Special episode. During some of the backroom emailing that went on during Michael Barnes Proudly Presents Secret Satan 2013, I received this email from Frank Branham, whom you may know best as the designer of Warhamster Rally. He said: Hey Barnes, I was just listening to John Lennon’s “Merry Christmas (War is Over)” and when he asked me “So this is Christmas…and what have ya done?” I realized that I had not done anything. So why don’t we all send our Secret Satan gifts to Shellie (aka Ubarose) this year?"...

The weather outside is frightful, but Next of Ken?  It's so delightful.  So if you've no place to go....join us, won't you?

It must be tough to make a good expansion. The proof is that there are a lot of mediocre ones, especially today when we have fewer “games” and more “core sets.” An expansion is essentially an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle a second (or third or fourth) time. A couple of games have pulled it off, but if a game has multiple expansions, it’s typically a case of diminishing returns. Either they ramp up the complexity, or they add more new content than any one group could possibly need. Add enough stuff, and a game could collapse...

Zombie board games tend to focus, like the films they emulate, on the players surviving by putting up barricades and beating the undead to death with whatever they can find. But if you’ve seen enough horror movies you’ll know there’s a second string, a darker theme where cooperative groups mercilessly pick the weakest member to sacrifice to the shambling hordes so that the others might survive. That’s the grim base on which City of Horror rests. And grim is the word. There are few games more callous than this. It’s not a game to play with...

More like "Hooey".

There’s a period in every gamer’s life where we harbor dreams that our friends and family will convert to hobby games. We show them some game (Ticket to Ride! Settlers of Catan!) that we hope will cause an epiphany that sends them scrambling for the nearest game store. And then the holidays come around, and our attempts fail. We learn that most people don’t even regard board gaming as a hobby possibility. As a friend of mine once said, it’s a little like telling someone your hobby is fruit. Most people never consider it an option.

Slide through the shadows and stealthily creep into this week's Next of Ken, where I talk about Wreck-It Ralph, American Horror Story: Asylum, Ruse, and two games from Level 99 Games' upcoming Minigame Library:  Noir and Pixel Tactics.  Join us, won't you?    

In this glorious age of reprints, there are very few remaining classic titles from the eighties that haven’t seen a rebirth in some form or other. Of those left stranded in the past most of any consequence were by designer Richard Hamblen. Known for his intricate and fiendishly detailed designs, one game in his oeuvre was relatively simple and short and cherished fondly for those exact reasons. And now Fantasy Flight Games has brought it to join the ranks of the resurrected.Thanks to an amicably resolved licensing dispute between Fantasy Flight and another publisher, Stronghold, Merchant of Venus actually...