Remember right after the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and every fourth board game that came out was all about the movies? And you would use worker placement or roll-and-move or cooperative puzzle games to reenact the adventures of Legolas and Pippin and Gimli and that kid from Goonies. After a while, the trend faded out and was replaced by an unexplainable deluge of zombie games, but I still remember how many times I played yet another Lord of the Rings game and thought, 'why can't I play someone else? Were these people the only ones who...

I made a strange realization a week or so ago. For all of my Ameritrash leanings and pretensions, I usually like games by Martin Wallace. Wallace usually designs dense economic games with drab names that only conjure images of furrowed brows around the table. But heaven help me, I enjoy his work. I’ve been playing Brass with some friends online, and when I combine that with my face-to-face experiences with the game I find that it’s becoming one of my favorite heavy Euros. I enjoyed Last Train to Wensleydale as well, though I would need to play it a...

You know the drill by now. Some feeble pun or other on the multiple meaning of the phrase “Bolt Thrower”. I really can’t be bothered today, so let’s get down to it.GamesThere are several games that I’ve reviewed twice, but I’ve made history this week by giving Commands & Colors: Ancients a third going over. The reason for revisiting it is partly because I thought the upcoming Playdek version for iOS made the game of above-average interest for the NoHighScores crowd and partly because I’ve never satisfactorily managed to articulate my feelings on the small fly in the otherwise...

A thrilling tale of discovery! An action packed adventure to the darkest heart of Africa! Two men in a search for fame, fortune and the source of the Nile! That's what I was expecting when I began to watch this movie. A tedious snore-fest is what I got instead. It took some true skill to take a scene where two explorers defend themselves against a thousand screaming tribesmen and suck every last drop of vitality out of it. And if the director could kill the excitement there, how much more of a suffocating tomb are the scenes in the...

 An 8-bit boardgame.