Gunpoint
This post has been sitting unfinished in the drafts folder for years, waiting for a breakthrough to finish it. You are that breakthrough. You know that overused moment in film and television where...
View ArticleSkip It: Combat, Barriers, and the Identity of Games
This isn’t about the unfair treatment of professionals who dare to voice unconventional ideas. We won’t discuss here the specifics of ugly incidents making the rounds online lately. Comments that stray...
View ArticleRPGs as Missed Connections
I want to write a missed-connection piece for those beautiful RPGs that have passed me on the train or gone unmet at the coffeehouse. Different kinds of game texts connect with different kinds of...
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At the Feet of Giants
This weekend I ran the first session of an ongoing campaign-in-miniature set in Middle-earth, using the game rules from Francesco Nepitello’s The One Ring (TOR). In the parlance of play, I’m hacking...
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More Harrowing Than Fun: A Tomb Raider Review
If you’d asked me before, I would’ve been skeptical. Another gritty reboot, this time of Lara Croft, a character whose confidence and poise under pressure was part of the hook? I know people who hated...
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What I Want in the Next Tomb Raider
More than anything, the new Tomb Raider game makes me enthusiastic for another game in the series that takes the best from this new vision and jettisons the game’s meanest elements. The result might be...
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Indiana Jones and the Game of Destiny
Indy and the Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark I’ve enjoyed a slew of Indiana Jones video games, like The Fate of Atlantis and The Emperor’s Tomb, but I haven’t played the Indiana Jones video game I...
View ArticleConversations That Count
In a post sketching out an Indiana Jones game I’d like to play, I mentioned that I’d like to see it incorporate “conversations that count.” This isn’t an innovative idea, I know, except maybe for the...
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Survival Heroism
In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s journey from survivor to action star to heroine (or antiheroine, but we’ll get to that) takes her through horrors visceral and terrestrial, mundane and...
View ArticleWhat Not To Do
At a GenCon auction ten or twelve years ago, someone suggested to me that the greatest tragedy that can befall a wargame is to be auctioned in a state where the shrinkwrap has been removed but the...
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