I was talking to a friend about KapCon, an annual Wellington RPG conference that's been going for 35 years or something ridiculous like that, and he told me that he didn't think he would attend. It didn't occur to me at the time, but my friend's social anxiety was the main blocker. He thought that t...
The term terrain, in the context of roleplaying games and wargames, refers to both the ground under the feet of your character, as well as the non-living objects around your character. If your character is in a forest, then the terrain is the forest floor, all its growth and composting leaves, and...
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. The Candidate's Wife Affair is an obvious and contrived riff on The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In this version of the story, it's the (you guessed it) candidate's wife that's brainwashed. Well, sort of. It's com...
I've written about how much I love a good gaming magazine before, and I've just finished the very good issue 522 of one of the few remaining gaming magazines, White Dwarf. I subscribe to the magazine, and it's a good thing I do because this isn't an issue I think I'd have thought to buy off the...
There are lots of wargames out there, and lots of them share essentially the same game loop, but many of them feel more unique than you might expect. When I started my War of the Rohirrim campaign, it was after a year of wargaming only in Warhammer 40,000. When I played, I was legitimately surpr...