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"West of Arkham, the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut." That's the opening line to H.P. Lovecraft's classic story, "The Colour Out of Space." It's also the inspiration for the title to one of my favorite boardgames, The Hills Rise Wild. As you may have guessed, The Hills Rise Wild is yet another game inspired by the mythos tales of H.P. Lovecraft. However, instead of playing gentlemen adventurers, you are controlling factions of hillbilly cultists. According to the designer notes by John Tynes, this game went...

Pictured is a game that doesn't look like any fun to me at all. Images like this are why I wasn't terribly enthusiatic about Vlaada Chvatil's DUNGEON LORDS prior to release. I thought it was going to wind up being more like THROUGH THE AGES, a good game but something very Euro and not at all what I would expect a DUNGEON KEEPER board game to be. The good news is that DUNGEON LORDS is great, and it's a perfect follow-up to GALAXY TRUCKER. Yes, it's a pretty hardcore Eurogame despite the setting and concept. It even has...

I should have a warning label or something:The surgeon general has determined that letting me review your crappy game can be bad for sales, not to mention what it will do to your ego.Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype is a good example of a game where the designer would have done well to read that warning label. Alas, he was inattentive, and apparently never read reviews of stuff I didn't like. Well, Uncle Chestnut, you probably should have done a little more homework. Table Gype is rife with examples of things that make me walk away in a hurry. ...

Sports board games are relatively easy things to manufacture. After all, they lend themselves to the medium pretty well (with some exceptions) – there are two players/teams, everyone understands what the goal is, and there’s the option of a time limit. I’ve played great board games of boxing, football, and ice-hockey (well, the hockey one wasn’t great, but at least it existed). There is one sport that seems something of a challenge to do, however, and that’s because it’s not technically a sport: pro-wrestling. When you think about it, though, it should be ideally suited to the...

I have a theory. I'll walk you through it, and then you can tell me I'm an idiot, and I can tell you that you're retarded.Dominion is one of the most influential games of the last ten years. Whether or not you like it, it's tough not to see that a whole new kind of game has been invented. The game has drawn a huge audience, and people from all over the gaming spectrum have been drawn to it like skeeters to a bug zapper. That kind of success draws more than just fans, too - it draws people...

I think it would be hard for any gamer with kids, especially one who appreciates the Ameritrash style of gaming, to look at a game like Haunted Ruins and not think, where was this game when I was growing up?? I mean, just look at the thing... It's a 3D pop-up board of a haunted graveyard, with moving obstacles and passageways, and you're being chased around by a ghost and a zombie. Being a rabid Scooby Doo fan as a kid, this would have been something akin to a "Grail Game" for...

In this week's bid to piss off Fortress: AT readers, I'm reviewing a game that almost no one will be able to play. It's GREED, INCORPORATED and the review is, as usual, at Gameshark.com. Some suggested topics for you to bitch about: - Why is Barnes writing about an obscure game when he's supposed to be writing for those snot-nosed kids that do nothing but play HALO? - Barnes is a hypocrite because he believes that games should be under fifty bucks but he's giving a great review to a game that's well...

Open Letter to Mayfair Games: Dear Guys Who Make Settlers of Catan,It is my sad duty to inform you that you are not Fantasy Flight Games. I apologize for the rude awakening, but I felt it important that you realize as soon as possible that you should not make Ameritrash games. You make some of the finest Euro games on the market, and you do it very successfully. I have personally enjoyed a great number of your European-style games. However, I do believe you are not very well suited to creating games with heavy themes...

RPGs are great fun. I honestly think that some of the funniest nights of my life have been with my friends, playing an RPG. They don’t deserve the label they have as a dorky past-time, consisting of various Asperger’s sufferers hiding in Mum’s basement pushing a lead dragon around. As I’ve said many times, I don’t understand how an activity that requires social interaction can be called sad, when sitting at home playing on your X-Box isn’t.

When I was a kid, I remember watching a movie called The Ice Pirates. It was about these spacefaring ne'er-do-wells who stole stuff, I think. The only thing that really stuck with me from my childhood was a mechanical torture device, kind of like a bear trap that snapped open and shut, and the bad guys put Robert Urich onto a conveyer belt that would feed him into the metal jaws, which would then bite him in the junk.