Search Results for: Games Plus

The 1001 Treasures of Black Blade Publishing and Goodman Games: Gary Con 2018 Report, Part II

Comments 14 comments

New releases at the Goodman Games table, including the magnificent Tales From the Magician’s Skull In Part I of my Gary Con 2018 report, posted here yesterday, I talked about one of the great pleasures of walking the Exhibit Hall: meeting the creative masterminds behind the most dynamic companies in old-school RPGs, like Goodman Games, North Wind Adventures, Troll Lord Games, Black Blade Publishing, Frog God, Kobold Games, and many others. Today I want to talk about the other great…

Read More Read More

Diplomacy and Trade in the Vastness of Space: Among the Stars by Artipia Games

Comments 0 Comment

I’m still processing all the treasures I brought home from the Games Plus Fall auction on Saturday. Things move fast at the auction, and you frequently have to make a snap decision to make a bid, or lose your chance forever. So more than once I raised my bidding card while thinking “What the heck is that thing?” That was the case with Among the Stars, a peculiar board game/card game hybrid… that I ended up winning for $16. It…

Read More Read More

Get an Inside Look at the Hottest Boardgames with Meeple Monthly

Comments 2 comments

If you hang out in game stores (and who doesn’t?) you’ve doubtless seen copies of GTM, Game Trade Magazine, a monthly industry mag for the Adventure Hobby industry that also doubles as a handy catalog for Alliance Game Distributors. GTM is always a pleasant read, with fun articles and full color pics of upcoming RPGs and card games. While I was browsing the magazine rack at my local game store last month, I came across something called Meeple Monthly, and at…

Read More Read More

Joseph P Laycock’s Dangerous Games: Revisiting the “Moral” Panic Around D&D (and You Thought the ‘Pups Were Bad)

Comments 13 comments

The 80s Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic gave my teenage AD&D group a headache… fortunately, only literally. I confess that we drank too much beer while watching the movie Mazes and Monsters. We giggled at the odd (willful?) misrepresentation of our world, but perhaps that was a kind of false bravado because we also talked too late into the night: “Did they just…?” and “Erk?” and “WTF?” And so, as is the way of things, we woke up without answers…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The D&D Adventure (Board) Games

Comments 10 comments

Back in 2010, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) decided to put out a board game that replicated playing 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. Now, 4th Edition was a debacle, but Castle Ravenloft, which was the first of four games in the Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Game line, is quite the opposite. It’s a cooperative dungeon crawl with set scenarios but random tile placement and in which the game itself serves as the dungeon master. I’ve not played Castle Ravenloft (previously discussed…

Read More Read More

Modular: Kickstarting The Northlands Saga Complete (Frog God Games)

Comments 3 comments

The Vikings are coming! I’m a fan of Frog God Games. Rising from the ashes of Third Edition D&D’s Necromancer Games, they make RPG products for Pathfinder, 5th Edition and Swords & Wizardry. Way back in 2014, I wrote here about The Lost Lands, the campaign world that would synthesize almost all of the Necromancer and FGG products — from classics like Rappan Athuk and Gary Gygax’s Necropolis to newer deadly adventures like The Slumbering Tsar saga. I’ve happily backed several…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Dangerous Games edited by Jonathan Oliver

Comments 0 Comment

Time for another New Treasure. This time, I’m in the mood for an anthology — one I can really sink my teeth into. Fortunately, I think I have just the thing. The latest anthology from Solaris, Dangerous Games, collects original short fiction from Chuck Wendig, Lavie Tidhar, Paul Kearney, Pat Cadigan, and many others, on a theme near and dear to my heart: games. In a world of chances, one decision can bring down the house, one roll of the…

Read More Read More

Frodo Baggins, Lady Galadriel, and the Games of the Mighty

Comments 6 comments

A classic image. Iconic. Frodo Baggins, Hobbit of the Shire, offering the ring of power to Galadriel, Elven Queen of Lothlórien. Ralph Bakshi version: Peter Jackson version: Yet, as is often the case in JRR Tolkien’s writings, things are not quite what they appear. Allow me to bullet point the bites Mr. Baggins has had to take out of the crap sandwich served up to him by fate up to this point.

Game Review: Dead of Winter from Plaid Hat Games

Comments 3 comments

Color me rotting-flesh green and call me thunderstruck. I believe I’ve been playing the best board game in my thirty years of dice rolling this week: the Plaid Hat Games survival horror magnificence that is Dead of Winter. Ron Burgundy “That’s No Lie” seal of approval. I know I often write here with tongue probing my cheek, but this time I’m undeadly serious. Maybe it was just the subject matter, or how dark the game can get as desperation builds,…

Read More Read More

The Paris Fashion Week of Games, Spring Edition

Comments 7 comments

You know what happens tomorrow? Think hard. That’s right! The Spring Auction at Games Plus here in Chicago — only the best auction in the entire country for dedicated game collectors of all stripes. I reported on the Fall Auction here, and confessed to a painful bout of auction fever at last year’s Spring Auction here. I used to attend these as part of a constant quest for rare science fiction and fantasy collectibles — things like Judge’s Guilds epic Wilderlands…

Read More Read More