Plaid Hat done do'd it again.

A master class in how to make a tight suspenseful intelligent thriller. Not one scene wasted. Not one event that doesn't have a purpose. Based on a book by Frederick Forsyth, who also wrote the Odessa File, and directed by Fred Zinneman, who did a lot of classic movies including High Noon and From Here to Eternity. The movie is a slow burn of ever increasing tension. The premiss is that an assassin has been hired to kill Charles De Gaul and even though you know he must fail because De Gaul was not killed, that doesn't stop you...

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...