Blogworthy: Star Wars Backgrounds, COVID-19 Ruminations, Games for Quarantine, Pandemic Brain Fog

Join Meetings From A Galaxy Far, Far Away With These Star Wars Backgrounds – Zoom meetings are exhausting and boring. Make them a little more interesting by throwing Cloud City, and X-Wings, and Death Star ruins into your background. David Brin’s List of “Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales” – Looking for some new books … Read more

Ticket to Ride: Europe

Multi-colored train pieces represent different routes that have been completed on the Ticket to Ride map.

My extended family started playing Ticket to Ride years ago. It’s one of our go-to games after holiday dinners, and we’re all comfortable with the mechanics, the strategy, and the map. We’ve mixed it up a bit by adding in the 1910 expansion, but for the most part,  the game’s been the same for years. … Read more

Searching for Kid-friendly Board Games

Winter is coming. In my house, that means long weekends trapped inside with increasingly crazy, argumentative kids enraged by too many hours fighting over the rules to Uno, Life, and Monopoly. It’s the sort of thing that inspired Cracked’s “Six Board Games That Ruined It For Everyone” post, and we see it in spades thanks … Read more

Radio Active #46: Notebooks vs. Desktops, Out of Darkness, Horror Betrayals

Things take a horror tinged turned in this week’s podcast with reviews of Midnight Syndicate’s retrospective horror music album Out of Darkness and the horror-movie inspired board game Betrayal at House on the Hill by Avalon Hill. Elsewhere in the podcast as for feedback from geek parents about the merits of getting a notebook computer … Read more

Game Day: Risk 2210

Game Day may be cancelled due to snow — freaking Pennsylvania spring weather — but that doesn’t mean we can’t still dream of what might have been. Tonight’s game was/is supposed to be Risk 2210 (check it out on Amazon) the science fiction re-imagining of the classic Risk board game of old. The game retains … Read more

First Impressions of Risk: Godstorm

A few years ago, I reviewed (Internet Archive) Avalon Hill’s then-new Risk 2210 board game (Internet Archive) for SCI-FI. Our gaming group loved it how the game took the game’s core mechanic, added a great deal of complexity and strategy to it, threw in a sci-fi theme, and still managed to retain that bizarre Risk luck factor. … Read more