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 Cracked LCD is MOVING?!

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...

 An 8-bit boardgame.

A reader asked if I would review Radekai, and mentioned that it was available on close-out at Target. Since I love to give people what they want (as long as it involves me talking about games), I went out this morning and bought about 20 bucks worth of this game. I played it, and it was very bad, and so I decided to take my revenge the only way I know how - by saying something bad about it on the Internet.

Come on in for Next of Ken, where in this week's column we'll bid farewell to a music great, gush unabashedly about The Avengers, and review two Alderac offerings in Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin and Nightfall: The Coldest War.  Join us, won't you?

Role selection & move.

The other day, my wife called me and told me I just got a package from Athens. I thought she meant the Athens that's in Texas, because I live in Texas and couldn't really figure out why I would be getting mail from Greece.

Sometimes the best game experiences come from trying something new. If I hadn't taken the plunge and bought Battlestar Galactica, I wouldn't have gotten into the Ameritrash scene. If I had never agreed to try out a full-night game of Descent, I never would have learned that long games can actually be more engrossing than little 60-minute goof-offs. And if I had never agreed to try some crazy game called Settlers of Catan my senior year in college, I probably wouldn't have any real hobby to speak of in the first place. It seems trivial to call those events...

In a curious co-incidence, just as I was bemoaning a lack of proper wargames on the iPad, the wonderfully named Slitherine Software (apparently a subsidiary of the well-known digital wargames studio Matrix Games) released Battle Academy for the iPad. Eliciting howls of outrage over its $20 price tag, Matrix were good enough to give me a download code so I give you all the straight dope on whether or not the game is worth the money.