This is a follow-up to my previous post. Last night I played EXIT: The Forbidden Castle with a different group of friends than the ones from last week's puzzle game. Notes: The game seriously handed us our butts. It took us two hours and forty minutes to solve it. We used several hint cards, though only three…
Please don't buy any of the Thames & Kosmos EXIT games... so I can play them with you! I purchased my first EXIT game because the series had won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 2017. These are "escape room" games: Your character is trapped, and can only escape by solving a…
It just occurred to me: In the past year, among my Wiccan friends, a couple moved to North Carolina, another friend moved to South Carolina, another is moving to Texas. Among my gaming friends, one has moved to Philadelphia. Another is moving to Seattle. A couple are moving to Minnesota. It's my deodorant, isn't it?
I've written video-game reviews from time to time, but this is the first one for which I'm giving a trigger warning: discussion of severe mental health issues. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an unusual video game in that the lead character is psychotic. I'm not using the term in its popular (and incorrect) sense of meaning "psychopath." Senua…
A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to be the gamesmaster at a game of Paranoia. I want to tell a story about that game. Let me set up the situation:
One of my favorite board games is Betrayal on House on the Hill. It’s a semi-cooperative board game. The game has two phases. In the first phase, the players work together in exploring an old house. After a random event occurs, the game shifts into its second phase: One players’ character is randomly chosen to be a traitor. The traitor works to kill off the other players’ characters, while the other players work together to escape that fate.
I found three more people who like Mage Knight! Now I have more of a chance to play one of my favorite games.
The year 2015 is a threshold year for me with respect to Live-Action Role-Playing. This year, I’ve been away from LARPing for as many years as I was involved in the hobby.
I recently picked up Playing at the World by Jon Peterson. This book is a history of the game Dungeon & Dragons.
Since many of my readers are Wiccan, I’ll use an analogy that will make sense to them: Playing at the World does for D&D what Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon did for Wicca. It explores the different elements and influences that resulted in D&D, and follows the chain of influence forward as D&D affected the world around it. [1] [2]