In my four-odd years of gaming, I don't think any event in the hobby was quite as big as the 2009 reprint of Space Hulk. It was out of print for some 15 years, and used copies were fetching a pretty penny on eBay. And what a reprint it was. The minis and tiles were some of the best ever produced. For perhaps the only time ever, a game totally looked like it was worth $100. 

About a month or so ago, my friend Chad invited me to his house to play a game called Das Motorsportspiel. As the German name would indicate, this is a car-racing game. Being something of a game fan, I took him up, and we had a great time. Das Motorsportspiel is the first car racing game I've played that actually recreates the feeling of split-second decisions, pressured timing, and breakneck speed of a car race. We had such a good time, we decided it would be good to get a league together.

I love dice. I love the feeling of having a handful of plastic shapes in my hand, and I love the thrill of throwing them and trusting that chance will pay off for you. Dice-based combat is almost always my preferred method of resolving conflict in games, like in Nexus Ops. And if I'm going for a short filler-length game, then a dice game like Roll Through the Ages or Zombie Dice is usually my choice. So you can imagine my thrill when I first heard word of Quarriors, the new "dice-building" game from Wizkids. I have a fondness for deck-building as a mechanic, and hey, dice can only help, right? And despite the mind-numbing title, it looked really good. Packaged in an attractive tin with over 100 custom dice and nice cards, Quarriors looks like it's ready for the big leagues. But my first game was...inconclusive. It's very disorienting to not be sure of your opinion of a game. It seems to have had all the elements that I would love, but I certainly didn't come away with tons of affection for those piles of dice. What happened?

When Fantasy Flight first began their "Living Card Game" business model, I told a friend that if they ever leveraged their Tolkien license into an LCG, I would be first in line. When they announced that very thing last summer at GenCon, I was all a-flutter. I'm a dedicated fan of Tolkien's classic novel, but all of the in-print LotR board games have left me somewhat cold. The best of the lot is the mammoth War of the Ring, but that was a game that was difficult to get to the table, since it required another reading of the rules before every session. And 2009's Middle Earth Quest was an easy game to admire from afar, but it faded fast down the stretch. Then of course, there's the classic Knizia design, one of the first of many cooperative board games. That was a very good design, but I had trouble actually loosening up and enjoying it. But I do think that the cooperative design is the best one for Tolkien's novel, since the villains are viewed in long shot. Fantasy Flight agreed with me, since The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is also a cooperative game.