Blog Archives
Cinema Skins
On an intellectual level, I understand it would be terrifying to attend a cinema where all the projections have pushed through the big screen to consume the moviegoers. But as an intellectual there’s some appeal to the prospect, because in preparation for such an occurrence I now only attend exhibitions of Brian De Palma’s erotic thrillers. Rawr.
Sadly, the mortals of Spooktacular were in attendance at a B-movie horror festival on Halloween night. Now they’ve been reduced to cheap theater snacks. And not the sexy kind of snacks.
I’d Like to Lodge a Complaint
Ahh… do you smell that in the air? That winter nip? That hint of woodsmoke? It’s the tangy scent of preview season, baby!
First on the list is Peter McPherson’s Lodge. Ever wanted to design a lodge? Now you can. Sorta.
Scratch & Sniffle
Now here’s something I haven’t seen before: a collection of six scratch-off board games designed by puzzle master Zach Barth. That’s a sentence that keeps getting more intriguing as it goes, especially after The Lucky Seven proved one of the most reliable single-deck solitaire games on my shelf.
What I didn’t expect was the smell. I don’t know how scratch-offs are made, especially scratch-offs as nice as the ones in this pack. These are hardly the state fair scratch-offs from my childhood. They still produce a royal mess — I’ve had to play with a little rubbish can next to the table — but that metallic scent has proven strangely addictive. Is this why people gamble away their life savings? Maybe I’d be tempted to do so as well, were the minigames in the state lottery this compelling. Let’s run through all six.
Cate’s Favorite Games of 2025
Hi! My name is Cate. This is my selection of my favorite ten games from last year.
Faith in Crisis/Transition/Expansion
It’s hard, maybe impossible, to not put yourself into Keep the Faith, the latest board game by Greg Loring-Albright. Going in, I always tell myself the same thing. This time, I say, the religion I create is going to be something different from the one I grew up in, the one I’ve spent a lifetime studying, the one that got me to learn a bunch of old languages in order to prove its connection to a millennia-gone church only to accidentally disavow itself in the process. And then, like this opening paragraph, somehow I find myself circling back, like a star trapped in a slow orbit around a black hole, hydrogen distending into that event horizon.
Okay, so perhaps I have feelings. Surely that’s a sign that Keep the Faith is a success. But if that’s so, then why is it so difficult to write about? Why has it taken me seven hours to get this far?
A Rather Whistful War
Fred Serval, one of wargaming’s great rabble-rousers, has a new game out. It might not sound like a new game, since I covered it a year and a halfish ago, but that was a convention freebie that required scissors and some buttons from your bottom drawer to play. A Very Civil Whist is now an actual game you can buy and play and push around, or maybe even press into service as a doorstop if that’s your thing.
I like it even more now than I did the first time.
Yub Nub
Yubibo exists to reveal which member of your group has selfish proprioception, a sentence I never could have conceptualized until I experienced a friend, with a dozen sticks poised between his fingers and those of four peers, suddenly rotating his wrist all the way around to arrive at a more comfortable position. Six other players were sent lurching in response, doing everything in their power to maintain the pressure on those sticks. It didn’t work. Foam balls and wooden sticks clattered to the table. Everyone laughed.
Movin’ Up an’ Down Again
For all that board games thrive on taking us to new places, exploration is surprisingly hard to do well. Explorers of Navoria, designed by Meng Chunlin, is a prime example. Set in a colorful world redolent of Root’s woodland or Oath’s turbulent empire, and populated by critters who wouldn’t draw much side-eye in either setting, Explorers of Navoria is nominally about pushing the frontier ever outward, but more accurately about shifting one’s position on a number of slightly differentiated tracks. In the proper mode — a persnickety combination of player count, expansion, and headspace — it’s a tasty and visually appealing course that feels good going down even as it leaves the stomach rumbling minutes later.
Best Week 2025! The Index!
Another turn of the Wheel. 2025 was a banner year for board games, which by extension means it was a banner year for Best Week. Down below, you’ll find an index of the year’s picks. Click on any of the images to be whisked to the corresponding article. To the old year! To the new year!
Best Week 2025! All My Children!
In those now-unreachable years before my daughters came along, I remember balking at certain statements. “Some things you simply can’t understand until you have children,” someone would say. Now that I’ve had kids, I’m adult enough to admit they were right… but still juvenile enough to believe they were drafting their offspring into props to prove a point.
And what, exactly, have my daughters taught me? The unnamed emotion of putting an infant to sleep on my stomach. The mind-blanking terror of sitting beside a hospital bed. The way even the simplest of board games can become profound shared experiences. What follows is a list I never thought I would write: the games that transformed my year not because they were innovative or philosophical, but rather because they let me pass a few meaningful minutes with my girls.
SPACE-BIFF! 