Analysis

Readers who have met me in real life know that I live for social interaction in games. It doesn’t even need to be an element of the mechanics, just present at the table in some form. If you’re the table that’s laughing and cutting up, that’s where I want to be. So I didn’t understand why so many gamers were so taken with playing games solo. On some level it defeats the entire purpose of playing games, which is to spend time with friends.

Wait, before you go any further- go read Alexander Awesome's interview with Bruno Cathala about Cyclades...it ties into my article this week in a way. I bumped off the top spot, but y'all need to go check it out. Second expansion, what?

I learned The Settlers of Catan from a college friend of mine, who explained it without glancing at the rules. We had a ball and played most of my senior year. It was only after I’d played some 25-30 games that I bothered to check the rules for myself, and discovered that he had taught us wrong on a couple points. For one thing, he didn’t use the alphabetical order for placing the numbers on the board. We just put out the numbers and tried to break up any adjacent red spots. But the rule that had a much...

I don’t like rating games, video or board. A good review should manage to encapsulate how you feel about a game without stamping a score at the bottom. Numeric ratings attract attention away from the writing, and have neither the subtlety or nuance to express wider ideas about the value of the game beyond its play, or the reviewer’s tilt. But I don’t always have the pleasure of writing just as I’d like to, and many of the editors I’ve worked for want scores. Out of five, ten or, worst of...

Upon reading Michael Barnes’s recent review of Exodus: Proxima Centauri, I felt a creeping weariness set into my mind. Not because of the review itself, since it was up to his usual high standard. Rather, I felt myself resigned to the fact that there could very well be a new 4X space game on the market, one that occupies a similar space to the very epic Twilight Imperium, and 2011?s more streamlined Eclipse. For the second time in less than 18 months, there’s a new epic space game that is apparently really good. And that can only mean that people will...