Crate Digging: June 2026
The best music curation blog you’ve never read and the heavy metal Carcassonne tee you never knew you needed.
5 Things I’m Watching, Playing, Reading or Thinking About
✍ Hobby Games Recce
Peter Schweighofer’s Hobby Games Recce is the latest addition to the vivarium of RSS feeds I keep as a second, slower, better internet. I like peering into the vivarium and seeing Schweighofer’s work there, earnest and professorial, as indispensable as lichen on a rock, patiently spreading and enriching the landscape as this father, history buff, and lover of games diligently blogs his world.
🎵 Five Random Songs
I got to know game designer Josh Buergel first as a fellow listener. I recognized in him the valiant directive of listening broadly and keenly in service of not only the recorded work, but the act of tending to supple memory and rangy curiosity. I was gladdened to see that in April, he refitted his Five Random Songs project to include not only his usual razor-sharp capsule writeups on things that surface in his playlist, but album and new release spotlights.
🎲 The Boardgames Chronicle’s Kingdom of Heaven Session Report
Now this is what I’m talking about: A session report that carefully places you in the setting, the strategic parameters, and a carefully rendered blow-by-blow of how player decisions created the story inside the pressurized guardrails of that scenario. You can scour it or breeze it and still come away with a vivid image of this game and the rush of its decision points. I love this shit.
✍ The Public Domain Review
Give me an 1,100-page tome about history and I’ll find a way not to read it. Feed me an era by zooming into art and words that come into the public domain every year, and you’ve got my favorite vocabulary, art, lit, and historical primer, all bound up in scholarly writing and gobsmacking peeps into the past’s feverish currents. This newsletter is the titan of my inbox. Be careful. You will lose an otherwise productive morning or two when this hits.
🎲 Daniel Solis’ T-Shirt Shop
There’s no shortage of clever, graphically adroit T-shirts out there that riff on tabletop themes. Solis stands out for the breadth and quality of his designs — including a recent entry that reimagines Carcassonne as a metal band album cover. You will likely find something on his page that will have you seriously weighing the tradeoff between, say, having your next meal or wearing one of these joints.
Have a rare and beautiful recco? Hit me up.
Track of the Week: The Beverly Hills Contingent Joins Soul Assassins
A nepobaby tale on its face, The Whooliganz’ joining of Soul Assassins birthed some fun tracks and an eventual production legend.
There’s some cool history and trivia behind this lost track, but let’s not overcomplicate it, all I really want to sell you is this feeling:
The Whooliganz, who sound like they’re about 10 here, were Scott Caan, son of famous actor James Caan, and Alan Maman, who later becomes the production legend known as The Alchemist.
These two guys met on the mean streets of Beverly Hills and got around enough to eventually get the attention of B-Real of Cypress Hill, who added them to the Soul Assassins crew, which also included House of Pain and Funkdoobiest.
B-Real shows up on the last verse here to give the track, and these two youngsters, the official Soul Assassins seal of approval. It’s a short appearance, but I still love the snap and construction of the line, “Oh, what a natural feeling/’Cause I’m the one with gun doin’ all the cap peeling.”
I think it was 1994 when the whole Soul Assassins caravan came to the Boulder Field House. I went with my roommate, Pogo.
I couldn’t roll joints, so I had one of those wooden dugouts on me with the ceramic one-hitter that looked like a filtered cigarette and popped up via a spring when you slid the top back.
While waiting in line I got super paranoid about the pat-down at the door. Fortunately, I was wearing sneakers that were so busted, the stitching had completely given on the entire left heel. I jammed it under my foot and limped through the entrance without incident.
We puffed the one-hitter and drank beer and got to see The Whooliganz, Funkboobiest, House of Pain and Cypress Hill in their glory.
There were tons of skinny skater-type kids there. B-Real’s crowd engagement trick for the night was challenging everybody to get two mosh pits going. The second pit was interesting. There was a big dude standing at the edge of it, built like a redshirt linebacker for the Buffs.
His version of moshing was waiting until one of the stoner kids came within reach, then grabbing them by the shoulders and hurling them. He was like a golden retriever in front of an automatic stick-throwing machine, bouncing back and forth on his feet, eyes sparkling, while he scanned for the next kid.
For the encore, all four acts came on stage. They did House of Pain’s “Back from the Dead,” Everlast rapping with the diminutive Son Doobie on his shoulders, all of them riding together that first big swell of label success in the purple-white stage lights.
Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience
Ghost in the Shell TTRPG: Preview Designer Chat With Alessio Cavatore
Designer Alessio Cavatore teams up with writer Zach Barouh for a plum assignment: Make Section 9 playable and faithful to the setting.
How does your first day as a Section 9 agent play and feel?
Designer Alessio Cavatore and writer Zak Barouh had to answer that question when Mantic Games acquired the license to translate one of manga’s most beloved franchises into a TTRPG: Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell.
Alessio Cavatore’s extensive track record in miniature and skirmish games — and his love for the original material — prepared him well to tackle Ghost in the Shell’s fast, lethal world of combat and ideas
Breakup Gaming Society’s resident indie TTRPG curator Walton Wood leads a talk with the disarming Cavatore, who talks about the thrill of being able to use all-original art from the manga and the collaborative challenge of making a system that was true to the beloved (and very dangerous) setting.
The toughest design conversations for Cavatore and Barouh yielded some of the most interesting fruit for GMs and players: Formalized tools for developing agents’ inner conflicts and richer storylines; bringing the original work’s philosophical underpinnings to the fore while quantifying the mix of augmentation, tech, and weapons that make combat fast and lethal.
Any firefight could be your last. Any mission could render your agent a burnout.
Cavatore’s depth of field in design, his giddy enthusiasm for the source material, and how he reveals himself as both a maker and a player made this one of our best recent talks. Check it out in the player above.
The Ghost in the Shell Tabletop Roleplaying Game launches in Summer 2026 from Mantic Games — hit the BackerKit page for more.
I’m seven sessions deep in Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts.
Cartographers Solo Flip-and-Write: I Was Fired After My First Play
My cartopher was attacked by gnolls who urinated on his lunch, but I still enjoyed this flip-and-write and intend to play it some more.
Cartographers Play Sheet: Rookie mapmaker Stafford Airbiscuit may not be a “culture fit” for this kingdom
As the backstory goes, the great Queen Gimcrack has just strong-armed a fat chunk of land from some other weakling, and it’s my job to help map it in the name of the Great Kingdom of Naloxone.
My name is Stafford Airbiscuit. I am a cartographer.
“Will the mission be dangerous?” I ask the queen.
“Probably,” she says. “Now get your little pencil out there and zone this thing.”
“How shall I zone it?”
“I don’t know yet,” she says, “it depends on where the mass graves are and how quick we can get residential developers on board. Keep an eye out for my edicts. And don’t put two artisanal burger places next to each other, it messes everything up, ‘kay?”
***
So it is my adventure with Cartographers begins — a game that continues to rate highly in the tabletop community among the past few year’s crop of move-and-write, flip-and-write, roll-and-write games…basically puzzles and engine builders where you attack a particular setting with paper and pencil trying to combo high scores based on where you mark things on your map or playsheet in response to the game’s challenges.
In Cartographers, the challenge is placing strips and chunks of polyomino-shaped terrain — villages, streams, forests, and farms — onto a newly acquired land. This land was won with the utmost probity and respect for international law.
The job description for my Cartographer, Stafford Airbiscuit, will be a lot like yours: You’ve got four seasons to do the job. During these seasons, changes in policy or the Queen’s blood pressure means the terrain patterns you’re trying to place will be rewarded in different ways depending on which exploration cards and scoring cards are out. Those cards also contain some curveballs, like finding Ruins that constrain your placement choices or pulling a monster raid from the deck, which crowds your map with unwanted symbols that drag down your score.
Hadrian’s Wall was my first experience with this school of design. I talked about that back in Episode 90. Hadrian’s Wall’s historical flavor, action variety and resource-heavy scheme kept it on my table for quite some time.
Cartographers is much simpler, which is the whole point; what I’m after here is something light and fizzy with a little pulp: Something refreshing in between learning sessions of Comancheria: The Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire, which is still hogging up my main table with its intricate procedures and massive scope.
So I sit down with a pencil and walk a few solo turns. Using the short and clear rulebook, the few solo turns quickly become my first game.
The turn framework is pretty simple and the conditional stuff is easy to get your head around: Set up a season, see which two scoring cards are in effect, then draw explore cards that show you what terrain types and shapes you have to work with.
***
I had an easy time with the mechanics, but not a particularly good game; Stafford Airbiscuit has to go back to the queen with a score of 37. Which translates into a job rating of -45 per the solo grading rules.
“So what were we doing out there, exactly,” she says, holding my map incredulously.
“Well, the goblins kept attacking and the gnolls stole my lunch and went to the restroom on my lunch…”
“And did they also force you to place these two farms in zones where we don’t even get tax credits? I specifically addressed this in Edict B. Did you get it?”
“It was in the same bag as my lunch. They didn’t even eat the lunch, that’s what was so hurtful and sick about the whole thing.”
“Listen,” she says, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose, “we covered gnolls in the kickoff meeting. Do me a favor, draw a timeout space somewhere on this map and get your head together. We’re trying to map a kingdom here, this isn’t adult daycare.”
Looks like poor Stafford has a lot of improvements to make if he’s ever going to become a proper cartographer.
There are still 99 map sheets on the pad. That’s plenty of chances to get better at reading the shifting cards for opportunity and scanning the map for better placements — and figuring out how to draw a house better. I still can’t believe how bad my houses look when I fill in a village space. It’s really starting to bother me.
My game 2 playsheet: Better than my first game’s score, but I’m still fired
If you like this style of game, check out my Hadrian’s Wall review.
Tracks of the Week: Motion Man’s Brilliant Work With Kool Keith and KutMasta Kurt
Motion Man’s extensive work with Kool Keith and KutMasta Kurt is a monument to indie talent.
“Motherfuckers oughta let me go and finish this motherfuckin’ album,” says Dr. Dooom’ (Kool Keith) on “No Chorus” from the Dr.’s First Come, First Served LP. “The name of this song is I don’t want the motherfuckin’ chorus.”
I listen to it several times a year. In terms of rants barely glued to hurried bars, it’s Dooom at his daffy, cranky best:
How many cats can look back at their flash-in-the-pan ascent and realize Dooom had them dialed in a long time ago with the terse performance review he tacks on to the end of the cut? “I’m a tell you straight, look in the fuckin’ mirror, you’re wack. That shit don’t sound right. The mixdown ain’t right. Your vocals are too low. Your fuckin’ cadence is off. Stage show is weak. Fuck you.”
I get stuck on another one from this LP on my last revisit: “Housing Authority” featuring Motion Man. KutMasta Kurt’s spooky and efficient mix gets more addictive each time. I hear more technique and connective tissue in the rubbery braggadocio as Dooom and MM trade verses:
One of Motion Man’s tracks came up in my feed years ago. I had to track it back down. It was from his 2002 album, Clearing the Field. Also KutMasta Kurt producing, with guest shots from Kool Keith, Biz Markie, Planet Asia and E-40, the last two from the Bay Area, where Motion Man hailed from.
The dude just had style to burn, so many gears, as he toggled between schemes and techniques. Put it with one of Kurt’s most get-up beats on the album and you’ve got this: a monument to underground talent I keep visiting, wondering how I missed it on so many previous trips. This trio was productive, also uniting for the Masters of Illusion LP, among other efforts.
Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience
Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, Pt. 2
For a two-day span, my desperate fight against living in the 21st Century is a triumph.
I’ve decided to spend as much of my remaining life as possible in the 20th Century.
I’ve taken my measure of this one and what I saw of the last. This one is ass. They told me I had to have a phone to read a menu the other day. Get the fuck out of my face with that. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need to be over my shoulder when I’m picking out lunch or on my nightstand when I’m making up filthy songs before bed.
Board games and books offer partial migrations — time zones where I can operate and think at a pre-digital pace. Tea and lots of water in the morning. Jot in the journal — I’m already getting sick of the narrator and his complaints — or read something. Get out for a walk.
I’m re-reading James Salter’s Burning the Days and found this from his prep school days:
I was a decent student and lagging athlete, an unknown at track and substitute on the football team. I remember a youth of friendship and no foreboding, though miles away, in Europe, war had already started. Not far from where we lived, in Yorkville, they were showing German propaganda films, Sieg im Westen, and later, Feldzug in Polen, and women in the lobby of the theater held out cans collecting for German War Relief. Battle’s distant sound. We sympathized with the British, naturally, and read with excitement, in newspapers that no longer exist, of the trapping by British cruisers of the pocket battleship Graf Spee in a South American estuary. Inspired, we invented our own warship game, brilliant as only schoolboys could make it, with complex rules for movement, engagement, damage, and resupply, maneuvering fleets of slender model ships on the bare wooden floors of apartments in endless fights, often with diagrams and accounts written up afterwards, word of it passing down, so that years after, people who had never seen but only heard of it asked to have it described.
Jimmy was a goddamn magician with a sentence. Pick this one up.
I first read this book at 29, when I was dumb enough to think I could craft some personal recall as luminous as this. Re-reading it at 56, I know I never did and never will.
But I re-read it to study his technique, re-experience those sentences that curl and glow like old paper in flame. Maybe he torched his journals afterwards and decided to name the book that way.
Thunderbolt Apache Leader is another private cavern of stories I refuse to forget. The new games can wait. I pull it out and run missions as a reward for getting steps done in preparing taxes, which is intrusive and undignified.
I know I’ve done the right thing when I slot the new mission sheet onto my black clipboard and pick out a sharp new pencil. Here’s how it started:
Mission: Iraq
Situation: Cutoff
Craft and Crew:
• A-10A (Halo and Rebel)
• F-16 (Mohawk and Dart, Dart upskilled for 1 SO point)
• AH-1 (Freak and Grandpa)
• AH-64A (Rock and Shadow, Shadow upskilled at Rock’s expense)
Strategy: Iraq is a forgiving region in this game, but the Cut-Off situation bears some thought. I blow about half my Special Option points on a sampler platter of craft and two Scouts.
The A-10A and AH-64A are designed to be paired against the heavier battalions, with a better-than-average pilot for each craft. Or swap out the Apache for the F-16 if I need more payload to get it done.
I allot two pilots with the Fast ability for the F-16 and AH-1. As the Cobra isn’t very durable, I plan to use it in a hovering starting position at the beginning of a mission, hopefully with LOS on high-value enemy targets that haven’t had the chance to go to cover yet. “Dump everything in the mag and run” is my doctrine for keeping this little chopper in service for five days.
The F-16’s job is to roar in and hunt down choppers and the most dangerous surface-to-air units, with a couple turns after to hunt. The greeting card is a Maverick/GBU-16/Sidewinder mix so Mohawk can slice across the map once or twice and knock out their sharpest teeth before they can bite back. It’s always Mohawk, unflustered by all. His understudy, Dart, never gets a turn in the seat.
I want to keep these visits brief as the F-16’s speed means it usually has to climb to high altitude and attract lethal Pop-Up Units — or else make a bunch of hairy ridge maneuvers all the time, which is not Mohawk’s deal. He was an enfant terrible in his gunnery courses, but he regarded finesse low-altitude flying as cumbersome and pedestrian. Falcons are only interesting at height and at speed, he reckons.
This is the first time I’m trying this approach.
I walk setup, taking my time with it. In its three years on my table, Thunderbolt Apache Leader is the most exempt from setup fatigue.
Some say it’s fussy, especially with the terrain and enemy battalion setup and breakdown for each individual mission. They’re right, but it’s an additive, like the overture music you used to get in theaters when movies still had intermissions and scenes that bustled with titanic human effort.
It might be my favorite part of the game, perhaps something akin to what a D&D player feels when picking out their character or getting the dungeon map ready. I can happily spend half a morning on it, the ceremony is like a drum line slowly building in volume.
I am not efficient, but I am engaged and delighted.
The Action
Day 1: Shadow and Grandpa are dispatched to take a bite out of Mechanized Battalion 3A. I send the F-16 and the A10-A — Mohawk and Rebel in those respective seats — to hit Artillery Battalion 1S and prevent the game-long drain on my SO points from that unit’s persistent effect.
Neither mission fails. Both battalions are halved. Mohawk, chosen strictly for his itchy trigger finger, hits his marks and flies off, leaving Rebel enough loiter time to scour hexes in an attempt to destroy the battalion, but he could not capitalize on any in-hex cannon strike opportunities.
The chopper jockeys fare a tad worse and would have failed had it not been for a single, shocking four-for-four Hellfire and BG-71 salvo from the Cobra.
Generally mediocre gunnery clouds what could have been a banner day.
Days 2-4: I am spellbound and neglect my end-of-mission notes. But the plan works on the whole. There were two Command units with persistent negative effects; one I hit hard enough to stop the SO point drain, but the other pushed the Assault and Support units at me top-speed for the duration of the campaign.
I did well by keeping a pile of SO points in reserve for the five-day drought, but that meant flying light sorties that were rarely able to KO a battalion on the first try, necessitating mop-up runs. While the enemy bulk was modest, what was there moved quickly and threatened me with a mission failure at the end.
I’d lulled myself into complacency a bit; never before had I hit Day 4 of any mission with pilots and craft in such good shape. The end-of-day assessment jars me: I was down to fewer than 5 Special Option points and three Assault units, even the battered ones, had pushed into the Friendly Rear band.
I calculated that I had to wipe two of them to survive the Special Option penalty if the remainder moved at all — which they were likely to do, as I’d left the Command unit that coordinated their rapid movement undisturbed for the entire campaign.
Day 5: Grandpa and Shadow (my first-ever in-game promotion to Veteran) are assigned the remnants of a Reserve force that will gain the base unless removed. An MLRS barrage and a brisk flyover by the whirlybirds breaks them.
This leaves another “must destroy” job for the jets against a halved, but still substantial, Infantry force. Mohawk does what he’s done the whole game and leaves. But the battalion is still at functional strength. It all falls on Halo again. The last path through and out is a three-hex canyon gauntlet, including three Pop-Up units summoned by Mohawk’s glib, high-flying ways.
Halo acquires and smokes the most dangerous Pop-Up Units, but the ground fire is withering and none of those intrepid strikes count against the battalion goal. The penalty exacted by the HUD damage sends Halo’s secondary volleys wide.
By the time he limps to the exit hex, all the loaded munitions are gone and his nervous system is just about on tilt. The A-10A has sustained two structural hits as well as damage to the engine, HUD, pylon and controls.
The math says I’ll destroy the battalion if Halo can use his nose cannon to pop a lone APC in his exit hex. He moves to the one-way exit side of the hex on his nearly exhausted fuel tanks, fires a burst. Nothing.
That leaves one shot if he opts to fire before moving on his next and final Loiter Turn. The roll is heavily penalized and I imagine him trying to eyeball it in his cradle of noisy alerts on the last circle-back he can afford to make.
Thunderbolt Apache Leader: Fly it like you stole it, Halo; end of last mission, Day 5
The die displays an 8 before serenely scooting an extra millimeter off my table. I don’t want to look at it as I pick it up. It rolled a 9 after hitting the floor, surely siphoning off the last good fortune from whatever bank holds these reserves.
I pitch it again. An 8.
Halo tacks to the base en route to a promotion of his own. The Cut-Off conditions that award SO points for killing battalions give me the cushion I need to absorb the penalty when the surviving enemies head for my base.
All told, I earn a Good rating with 16 net VPs.
***
Here’s Salter again, talking about his childhood reading and re-reading of Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West”:
I did not invent any games for the poem or pose before the mirror as one of its figures; I only stored it close to my heart. In the end, I suppose, I found the poem to be untrue, that is, I never found an adversary to love as deeply as a comrade, but I kept a place open for one always.
Of the cardinal virtues, it was fortitude the poem held high, perhaps with a touch of mercy. Fortitude, I saw, was holy. My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it. I was white-skinned, sheltered. In the street I ran from gangs of toughs. Tunney, Dempsey’s most famous opponent, soaked his fists every day in brine to make them invulnerable, my father had told me, to toughen them, and it was in some sort of brine that I hoped to steep myself.
Halo took a good soak in that barrel on Day 5. This is etched somewhere in gold leaf that fades as the disorder of my home and all the other undones come back into focus. A voice mail from an old friend that has to be listened to. Preposterous.
It is the first of many transmissions of the age that erase the magic, truer world, bleach that particular color of triumph from the page and the sky.
I don’t like even needing a computer to tell you about it, if I’m being honest.
Tracks of the Week: How to Lead Off or Close a Posse Cut Courtesy of Keith Murray and Kwest
Keith Murray shows you how to open a posse cut on “I Shot Ya.” Kwest shows you how to close it out on “5 Star Generals.”
I keep thinking about first lines in hip hop cuts because that’s the criteria Doghouse Reilly uses for determining which lyric goes on a shirt.
It turned into a sideline solo trivia game I play in my head all the time. It’s also infected my listening habits. Part of my brain is always scanning the first line when a hip hop track comes up on shuffle, which it does about 65% of the time.
The other day “I Shot Ya” pops on — a posse cut anchored by LL Cool J and also featuring Keith Murray, Prodigy, Fat Joe and Foxy Brown. It’s probably a bit too vulgar and aggressive for a Doghouse tee, so I’m gonna try to screenprint it on your brain instead.
Imagine you’re Keith Murray, already getting a lot of buzz for your work with Def Squad, and you get assigned the leadoff verse. The great LL Cool J has picked you for this five-minute farm team of potent rising talent.
What’s your first line?
Here was his solution:
“I’m here to make a dollar out of 15 cents/And let my balls hang like I’m on the toilet takin’ a shit.”
I wonder how many lines he jotted and scratched out on the pad before settling on that — an unrhymed, brash piece of idiomatic double-barrel provocation.
As a strategy, it makes total sense; walk right up and toss a bag of snakes on the poker table. In practice, I think it works because of the energy and level of commitment in that and the follow-up lines.
Now here’s a different one to think about — a master class in how to close out a posse cut. In 1998 Shabaam Sahdeeq puts out a 12” on the Rawkus label and puts a track called “Five Star Generals” on it — a convoy of underground talent with himself, AL, Skam and Eminem.
But at the end, it’s Kwest’s turn. You can go back to the preceding verses and check it out for yourself, but I’m confident in saying he just buries everybody:
I loved finding this track because Kwest’s debut LP is still one of my favorites. I don’t think Kwest really ever got his due. He was a big talent who got lost in various stages of label hell and shifting tastes. Those launch windows are brutally small and the world spins so fast.
There you have it: One example of how to lead off and another of how to finish a posse cut, courtesy of Keith Murray and Kwest tha Madd Ladd.
Related Listening:
• “Hostile” from Erick Sermon’s debut solo LP, No Pressure. This one features Murray rhyming with Sermon over one of the album’s many badass beats. I always love it when an MC starts a verse by yelling out his own name. Murray often boasted that he was the best of his class. He certainly raps like he believes it.
• Also check out a track called “101 Things to Do While I’m With Your Girl,” by Kwest tha Madd Ladd, whose delivery and wit make this one of the best entries of the “I’ll take your girl” song category ever. I would frame this right on the same wall with Big Daddy Kane’s “I Get the Job Done” and LL’s “I’m That Type of Guy.”
Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience
Crate Digging: April 2026
My favorite small-channel tabletop YouTube find, a DJ tears up the 45s in a drum break seminar, two novels that touch on invented games, and Noisy’s impressive Fantasy Flight Silver Series collectin.
5 Cool Stuffs to Watch, Play, Read or Think About
📺 Rules Challenge
I can’t sit through an hour-long explainer video prior to learning a board game. I have to knock around the rulebook with the thing out on the table and course-correct with FAQs and BoardGameGeek. But Rules Challenge showed me a step in my learning process that I never knew I needed — getting a well-shot quiz on a bunch of situations from a game after I’ve gained an experiential frame of reference. I strained mightily in my first few solo attempts at SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. With two games under my belt, I stumbled across this gent’s SETI quiz and watched every minute. Massively valuable for me. In the last year, he’s also done Pax Pamir, Maria, Hegemony, Molly House, Dune: War for Arrakis, Unconscious Mind, Maracaibo, Arcs, and Ark Nova. Take a spin through one of these excellent videos, you might be surprised at how many finer points you’ve actually retained. My hands-down favorite small-channel tabletop find of the year.
📺 DJ Mark 7” Throwdown Vol. 1 (Breakbeats)
This is so fucking beautiful. And a nice “rules quiz” of your own if you think you know your classic soul/funk/jazz hip hop breaks. If you like watching a guy mix really well — and love tracing samples, like I do — this is one of your better music watches. Outstanding set, DJ Mark N, sir. This is edifying and it bangs.
📕 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover
This forwarded along from Breakup Gaming Society friend and contributor Fritz Godard: A reprint of a 1968 novel about a guy called “…Henry Waugh, an accountant who spends his nights running a solitary baseball league of his own invention. He conjures his Universal Baseball Association with dice, elaborate scorecards, and meticulous record books — but most of all imagination. Henry’s is a coherent, vibrant world, a closed system with its own history, genealogy, politics, and language,” writes Edwin Turner of Biblioklept. As somebody who has built imaginary campaigns and worlds of his own — and who honors the impulse in others — this looks fascinating.
📕 Burning the Days by James Salter
I first read this book at 29 and the simple — but not simplistic — bent of Salter’s lambent prose tricked me into thinking that I could write sentences of that strength about myself someday. Revisiting it at 56, I realize I never did and never will. Still I wanted to bathe again in the adventure of his life and the tender, controlled reed sound of this guy’s technique. And speaking of invented games, I stumbled across this passage from his prep school days, which I’d forgotten ‘til now:
"I was a decent student and lagging athlete, an unknown at track and a substitute on the football team. I remember a youth of friendship and no foreboding, though miles away, in Europe, war had already started. Not far from where we lived, in Yorkville, they were showing German propaganda films, Sieg im Westen, and later, Feldzug in Polen, and women in the lobby of the theater held out cans collecting for German War Relief. Battle’s distant sound. We sympathized with the British, naturally, and read with excitement, in newspapers that no longer exist, of the trapping by British cruisers of the pocket battleship Graf Spee in a South American estuary. Inspired, we invented our own warship game, brilliant as only schoolboys could make it, with complex rules for movement, engagement, damage, and resupply, maneuvering fleets of slender model ships on the bare wooden floors of apartments in endless fights, often with diagrams and accounts written up afterwards, word of it passing down, so that years after, people who had never seen but only heard of it asked to have it described."
🎲 Noisy Andrew’s Fantasy Flight Silver Series Games Collection
MY GAWD WOULD YA LOOKIT ALL THOSE FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES SILVER TITLES. Among his many interests, Noisy Andrew — Breakup Gaming Society’s Resident Boardgaming Big Bro — made a point of snagging every Silver Series box he could across the years. You’re looking at Magdar, Citadels, Delta V, Scarab Lords, Minotaur Lords, Drakon, Orcz, Atlanticon, Quicksand, King’s Gate, Kingdoms, Inkognito, Cave Troll, Maginor and Arena Maximus. Recently Noisy hopped on the mic with me to capsulize all of them, but we were having latency issues and we’ll prolly have to retake it. I only played one thing in this pic — Citadels — and I think we got some decent audio on that, which will be added and written up in Breakup Gaming Society’s living post on Fantasy Flight Games’ golden age, which also includes supplemental interviews with board game writer Matt Thrower and Shelf Stable cohost Kenny Katayama.
This project is burgeoning past my understanding.
He’s played ‘em all, people: Noisy and his vintage Fantasy Flight Silver Series stacks
Have a rare and beautiful music or games recco? Hit me up.
Tracks of the Week: Latifah, Monie and Ultimatum’s Remix Magic
Two reworks of a track from Latifah’s debut, All Hail the Queen: The 45 King’s extended “Ladies First” and Ultimatum’s “Dance for Me”
Queen Latifah’s release of All Hail the Queen in 1989 was catnip to critics and the beginning of a veeeery good run for Dana Elaine Owens that arced from albums to the screen.
The tracks I return to most are both remixes of tracks on that album — and are both touchpoints for how hip hop and electronic acts from the U.S. and UK breathed one another in.
The first is The Crazy Extended 45 King Remix of the album’s most well-known song, “Ladies First.” Obvious UK tie-in here. Guest rapper Monie Love showed up and blew the doors off:
DJ Mark the 45 King (RIP) is the production name I most associate with this album, but Prince Paul, Daddy-0, KRS-ONE and Louie Vega also contributed to this breakout.
My second never-skip off this album is the Ultimatum remix of “Dance for Me,” which also has UK DNA in it. It also had more juice, mood and adrenaline than the LP version.
Ultimatum was a specialist remix outfit composed of the Stereo MCs camp — yes, fellow Americans, the outfit that had a big hit over here with “Connected” in 1992 — and DJ Cesare, who is listed as the Ultimatum remix point man and sometimes as a member of Stereo MCs. He had his beats and scratches in all kinds of projects and groups, from the KLF to Psychic TV.
It’s only fitting that where the US touches the UK touches hip hop touches dance music, you get a rich font of sample sources. If WhoSampled is to be believed, you’re getting pieces of James Brown and a Sly and the Family Stone medley track smoothly Frankensteined to a 1986 track from The The and bits of drums from post-punk legends Magazine.
You can’t deny how they put it all together over Latifah’s bright exhortations to get on the dance floor:
Some of my favorite co-minglings of hip hop and electronic sensibility right there, especially the urgency of the drum break.
What fun. I’m just gonna play some more of it while you add this to your playlist. My work here is done for today.
Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience
Mix Up Fairy Tales: Interview With Warcradle Studios Co-Designer Robin Cruddace
Warcradle Studios’ Robin Cruddace talks to us about Mix Up Fairy Tales, a co-op family storytelling card game designed in collaboration with the British Library.
What happens when two designers from Warcradle Studios — Ziz Simoens and Robin Cruddace — get to raid the British Library’s sumptuous vaults of period fairy tale art?
You get Mix Up Fairy Tales, a family card game where two to six players remix the elements of eight classic yarns simultaneously — with a milestone scoring challenge system that leavens the laughs with some strategy.
Mix Up Fairy Tales co-designer Robin Cruddace got some help forming the core play concept when his daughters got their hands on some prototype art. There may be lucrative consulting work in their future.
Puss in Boots can find himself contending with the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk, for instance. And if playtesting reports are to be believed, seeing Goldilocks pushed into an oven might be just as important to your group as meeting the game’s scoring requirements.
The project arose from the British Library’s Fairy Tales exhibit (running until Aug. 23, 2026 in London). The Warcradle team broached the possibility of spinning up a companion family card game.
Simoens and Cruddace were paired up for the design work, which included working with British Library staff to comb a massive stock of vintage storybook art. The game found its core concept when research artwork fell into the hands of Cruddace’s two daughters, whose spontaneous play with the cards revealed a direction that could engage younger and older players at the table.
Breakup Gaming Society host Nate Warren and contributor Walton Wood talked to Cruddace about the origin of the project, the concept of the game, the importance of multigenerational play and storytelling — and the surprises he found in both the stacks of the Library’s art and on the playtesting table.
Take a look at Mix Up Fairy Tales for yourself at Wayland Games or via the British Library Online Shop.
BONUS: Meet Professor Phelyx and learn about tarot’s history as a storytelling game.
Dwelling Solo RPG Session 7: The Gehenna Task List
Another rust-colored bird is admitted from a new door, which flaps out with a puff of ash and alights near my pillows.
BASEMENT
Conjure: The basement is bathed in a sickly red glow. Everything I imagined from the most fear drenched moments of my childhood are summoned here in the basement around me. Bodies, forms, beings etched into shadow, and wall, floor, and even the red light that is spreading through the basement.
They seem to mill around and at the same time not move at all: In the naming sounds of this hell, they are called CORdy, Derek, and molmolmolmolmolRIC, but also sometimes they are called Krabeltst or Elemena-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh — or maybe these are simply other words they use often.
In the light of other places they would be handsome protectors or kids who could sell you something useful at a fair price, but here they will, with the same charming half-interest as in the other lights, help themselves to the marrow. CORDeeee or is it molmolmolmolmolRIC are in charge of a great camera rig, which they move around as they banter.
The rig is like a bulbous scepter of fused seeing devices with a single metal stalk and tripod, lenses of all sizes jutting out. It is not always clear who is holding or moving this array. They seem to understand not only which way it’s supposed to point, but that whatever it captures will not cloud one happy afternoon on patios full of the handsome and ravenous.
They don’t bother to issue direction or let me in on the script; they have already won in the last scene under the light of other worlds, I think. There are old Minolta 35mms and many telephotos, hooded security cams and phone screens; the Gordian recesses of their cabling glisten with fluids.
There are women also — maybe three, maybe four — called Mllllghean, and gribn and Melanimanianuhnuhnuh. These Friday casuals, they gather and chatter as producers or directors would with extras in earshot. It doesn’t matter if the help hears the plan. What are they going to do?
Their overlapping chatter is a train of rushing cuneiform cars at the edge of the bed…there is a bed now, by the way — an immense bed set violently against what I think the basement should allow.
I am naked under the comforter, the top edge of it arched enough to see the personnel. I am trying to burrow into the bedding, but the edges of it give with the room’s breath and the smallest gap, though a body’s length away, jolts my legs into fits of weak pedaling motions.
Some of the women stand, some sit at the edge of the bed as they burble to each other in the dream tongue. Simultaneously I want to be joined under there or left unseen, but in their talk, gales of oblique assignments batter me, planting false memories of emails or spreadsheets stacked with barked orders in the same unforgiving dialect.
I am being transmitted directions in the ur-language of every deadline, the soundbed of every two-minute span before you’re three minutes late — of hallways you failed to navigate in buildings where you didn’t belong.
The senseless instructions keep coming. Gribn and Mllllghean keep laughing and I want them to know I need either rest or touch, either will do. The boys reposition their rig for the fourth time, the air pressurized with the hatred of its seeing. I writhe again in the void of the blanket that refuses to cover or hide me.
I never noticed the small hinged door of the soot trap nor knew there was a wood furnace down here; there are several of these tin doors now set into the brick at irregular spacing, and Melanimanianuhnuhnuh or one of the others goes to one of the doors every so often, not breaking a sentence, and admits another rust-colored bird from a new door, which flaps out with a puff of ash and alights near my pillows.
They have rust eyes and black, rectangular pupils and they, too, wait for me to execute instructions. They arrive constantly.
Sleep, God give me sleep, one bundle pinched at the edges against the vapor of a poison moon or give me one body to hold that muffles this language forever. One cuppable butt in the night would be the rondure of one perfect word in the manifold unasked questions of the savior’s tongue.
God, give me rest.
The instructions keep coming.
Somewhere diagonal and down from my heels, I feel a rush of cold as the bottom corner of the comforter is raised again.
Next: Back to the First Floor
Plucky Indie TTRPGs You Could Be Playing Instead of D&D: A Curated Interview Series
Metal Queens ov Skull Mountain TTRPG: Thrash Storytelling With a Simple Chord Structure
With its lean, mean d20 story-first system, Metal Queens ov Skull Mountain is as metal as you can make it.
With its simple chord structure designed to go fast, Metal Queens ov Skull Mountain promises a story- and feat-centered combat crescendo in the wastes surrounding the mountain where your Metal Queens preside.
Breakup Gaming Society hops on the line with Walt and learns how, with the help of your GM (Demon Queen) and the game’s straight-ahead d20 system, you’re upping your Thrash skills in no time and burning your name into the scroll of legends.
Hit play below for our 20-minute chat about this flexible gig that’s just as metal as you can make it.
Check out other indie TTRPG reccos from our series of talks with Walt.
Professor Phelyx’s Tarot: A Slight Retelling of the Deck’s Magical Story
When magician and scholar Professor Phelyx told me he was 500 hours deep in the making of his own tarot deck, I wanted to know why.
My pal Professor Phelyx — emcee, magician, mentalist, artist, aesthete-at-large — has likely popped onto a stage in front of you, especially if you live in Denver. I caught back up with him and learned he’s already 500+ hours in on the creation of his own tarot deck.
I wanted to know why, as almost anything this urbane dude puts his mind to is worth a gander.
He talked to me about why he felt the need to hand-make a woodblock-style tarot mod that nods to his deep-dive into his German lineage and tarot’s historical importance as a storytelling game for everyday folk.
Hit play, learn some cool history, and let The Prof show you his next painstaking trick…
Scrabble Session Report: The Co-op Aspect of Matches with The Moms
With the right folks, Scrabble is a quasi co-op game about mental spelunking AND a duel. The Moms is the right folks.
I ate some fine food with the ‘rents in Taos last September. Tagged along with them for a day trip to Ojo Caliente, their favorite self-care amusement park.
When you’re a nice person such as The Moms is, you generate all kinds of cool opportunities in the Denver Nice Old Person Barter Economy. She spent a whole day teaching somebody how to can food at home. They kicked her back a free stay in a beautiful house in Taos.
The house had a name, like estates do. It was so pretty it hurt, and so was the street where it sat, dozing in inauspicious good taste under its dome of sweet air and decades of fastidious zoning. There was a block’s worth of desert meadow across the lane. Cars passed rarely and at reverent speeds when they did.
Inside, we stole away to sleep when we liked, sometimes gathering to read or scroll at the central table. No bigger decisions here than the timing of coffee, the composition of snack plates — the unforced overlap of the domestic rhythms of two octogenarians and their middle-aged son.
The last evening included a game of Scrabble, which The Moms always asks for when I see her and which I usually manage to dodge because I’m a finicky twat. But by then the neighborhood and the company had loosened me up. I’d have eaten kibble out of a stranger’s unwashed hand.
She cleared the table while my stepdad scrolled on his iPad and listened to 20th Century composers. It was a magnetic travel set, its longest journey taken through two generations of her family. I will likely end up with it some day. Every tile was still there.
The action and the company were good. I recognized in her my approach to the game: Competitive, but leavened with the pure delight of words. Both of us were prone to unwise plays that open up parts of the board to the opponent because the word we found was too pretty not to line up.
That kind of thing would never fly with her brother, who has one of those Scrabble dictionaries that lets you smash your opponent to their knees with two- and three-letter words that all sound like rocks.
He always played this way. During my visits to Chicago as a boy, he’d play his 3M Bookshelf Games with me when he was in med school, no quarter given. “The object of the game,” he would always say with the purr of a deadpan emcee, “is to win. The winner — that’s me —…” Then he’d describe the game and beat me soundly.
Those 3M games — as well as my grandmother’s 1980s Genus Edition of Trivial Pursuit — are in my care now. It’s not written down in any of the succession docs that sit in a plastic binder back in Starkville, but I assume I’ll be the keeper of Mom’s travel Scrabble set, providing I do her the courtesy of staying on the right side of the dirt longer than she does.
Neither of us played to lose, but there was a broader concord informing the match: To prod sparks from the hidden vaults of language and admire them together. The beauty of Scrabble — or any good trivia or word game — reminded me that we’re all water bugs skating on the black pools of the self. What’s down there?
Looking for a midgame play, I found the word “griot” was down there. I couldn’t remember the definition or how I came by it, this emissary from the sleeping water of the mind.
I mostly managed to keep pace with her, but I got the bad end of two of the game’s three challenges. The lost turns were the game’s winning margin.
***
A few summers ago I woke up with a sore back and hamstrings and a plangent, tentacled hangover because I’d spent the late evening and early morning, drunk as a lord, standing bent over my kitchen counter yelling into my laptop and trading vintage Trivial Pursuit questions with an equally drunken high school friend.
I got a question about which two actors refused their Oscars in the ‘70s. He gave me an astonishingly long time to get it. He gloats when we wins — once he did it so bad I hung up on him — but he was rooting for me on this one.
I somehow knew that one had to be Marlon Brando because he was cagey and artistic. I strained until the other one arrived: “It was George C. Scott,” I said after several minutes of plumbing…I don’t know. It seemed beyond reasoning, beyond memory. Magical alcoholic treasure hunt. The brain is a protean dungeon map with endless replayability. He huzzahed as if the answer were his own.
***
After The Moms packed the set back into the drawstring bag, her imploring post-game question IDed the real opponent at the table: the doldrums of forgetting.
“I need to ask you a question,” she said. I braced for unwanted family revelation. “Did you let me win? Did I do that on my own?”
She’s sensitive to her growing memory gaps, vigilant to slippage. I was happy to tell her I’d played at my peak and lost straight up.
Back to a theme I touched on while learning Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: I’m a neurotic dude, and five years in the country living solo has brought me all the best and worst of my lifelong drive for emotional autonomy and time un-crimped by the desires or impressions other people have of the world, which are torture when not taken in careful bites.
At the best: This buys me the time I need to be possessed totally by what is worthy, thereby erasing time. At the worst: I fail to recognize the midpoint where a version of this joy can be found with others, and judge others ungenerously for their clumsiness in recognizing the melodies of my private hymnal.
I wanted to report the final score in this segment, so I asked her to text me the outcome, which I know she wrote down.
That she keeps forgetting.
Trivial Pursuit is an excellent trivia question set welded to an unnecessary board.
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door (Ava Earns Her Stripes)
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door’s three-killer problem starts to get broken down, one swing of the bat at a time.
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door - If you’re having a lakeside get-together this summer and you think the neighbors might get out of hand, invite Ava, she’ll handle it.
A scant four, maybe five, turns in to my first game of Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: Ava, our hero, is cornered in the garage of Wingard Cottage as Trish, Zeke, and Baghead converge on her. The first blow halves her health and makes her forget what kind of thing she was trying to fashion from the junk in there.
It hardly matters now. It’s a killers’ moon up there tonight.
What could have stopped this tide? Before they turned their exclusive attention to Ava, the three Intruders cleared out the rest of the cottage like a six-legged thresher.
They drew the Coordinated Attack Dark Power, which put them on the march every turn.
They drew the Amphetamines Dark Power.
And The Outsider — a special victim meeple summoned by the first action card — all but sealed it.
It felt like what might have happened if the Manson family studied 100 hours of special forces breach-and-clear videos on YouTube. It’s an utter rout: So sudden, so rude, so total, that I can only laugh in admiration. After all, this is what I came here for.
This is my second trip through the rooms of a Final Girl location.
The first was Final Girl: Madness in the Dark, based on the Silent Hill console franchise. I tilted with that beast something like 15 times before getting my first victory against Wolfe Asylum’s Ratchet Lady and her minions.
I raged against it for weeks. What kept me in it? I was hypnotized by its kaleidoscope of candy components, evocative scene-making, the coruscating variety of its cruelty, the rollercoaster dosages of choice and chance, the deadpan jokes it writes in human fluids.
I gave my buddy Fritz a few hits of the action at Wolfe Asylum one night last summer and he had his own core box and first movie — Killer from Tomorrow — within weeks. “The worst loss at Final Girl,” he texted me recently, “is infinitely more interesting than a month of any streaming service.”
His enthusiasm arced back to me and got me shopping a new challenge from Van Ryder Games’ ever-expanding lineup of exquisite torture devices. I finally opted for A Knock at the Door because I liked the twist: Fending off three killers at once, with the option to rig up grisly homemade weapons with stuff you find around the house.
I finally remember what Ava was thinking about in that first game before her vision flipped to permanent static: She was thinking about making an Obliterator — a two-hander that Ava can build if she collects wood, rope, discarded tools, and nails.
But to do that, you need time and composure and the ability to recalculate opportunities and threats faster than the three Intruders can julienne all your pals like fresh onions.
Finding a substantial weapon while you hustle a victim or two out of one of the board’s exit spots is usually a solid opening sequence, but the appearance of The Outsider derails me. Ava burns a hellacious pile of action cards getting to the bedroom where The Outsider was moping.
It’s not until I move her there that I realize the room has no western or southern exits, so Ava has to drag them back out along the same route.
Where were the clean extraction drills I seemed to run so well in Wolfe Asylum? The zones outside the cottage soak up action cards like thirsty desert soil. One of the Intruders catches up with Ava and The Outsider just as they clear the house, simplifying the problem by hacking The Outsider to bits in front of her.
By this time the board is on full boil and the first game is lost.
I picture a party banner loosening at one end in a room full of the slain. You can just make out the text before it folds over on itself: WELCOME BACK FUCKER.
***
My first day of play grinds to a halt because something doesn’t make sense about the pace at which the Intruders tore through that map. It feels unfair even by Final Girl’s callous standards.
I hunt down every thread I can find about the Coordinated Attack card. None of the discussions plainly address this problem I’m seeing with the word “effect” as it appears in the scenario-specific rules and on the Terror card itself.
Several times that day I try to become a more practical player: The instinctual ruling is probably right, I tell myself. The sensible thing is to run with it. But why is the operational language not lining up? During the afternoon I think myself into a shadow world.
I describe the problem on Reddit. On BoardGameGeek. To my friend Dave over at Dude! Take Your Turn. I got so desperate for answers in between waiting for forum responses that I even ask Sam Altman’s world-burning machine.
It gives me a long explanation of why my bent-up conclusion about the card language is correct, and why I can play the game incorrectly if I really feel like it.
“Some players,” it notes, also interpret this card in a more forgiving way. I keel sideways out of my chair when I realize it is using my own question threads from that day to justify the ruling. Sweet Mother of God, please watch over the souls of the lonely children in the clutches of this trillion-dollar imbecile.
At this point of the day-long wrestling match, my inability to figure out the game appears in a continuum with both everything I’ve failed at, ever, and everything that’s objectively fractured in the world. This is a reminder to put a permanent asterisk over everything your host says about board games. He’s not entirely well.
My question was valid in the semantic sense. But it had nothing to do with the law as applied. The toughest part of the map was in my head. Like Dave told me via email: “Don’t make it tougher than it already is! LOL.”
I was too young to remember how the conversation started, but I remember my Dad — who could also build mental traps out of anything he found — telling me in the cab of the truck one day on the way to town: “Warrens do it the hard way.”
I heard it hopefully, like it meant we were a tough breed.
But his jokes were warnings for the decades to come.
***
Fortunately the Warren family inheritance also includes a tendency to fixation and addiction. Which begets repetition. Which begets improvement.
Ava charges back into Wingard Cottage at least six more times over the next few days. She weathers several ugly misfires that aren’t worth playing past the fourth turn. But the facts of the new terrain and its adversaries start to blend with known best practices.
The contests get a lot less lopsided. I start to internalize the new rules, settle down and bite back. On the fourth or fifth game, Ava gets the whole “arts and crafts” thing well enough to make a spiked bat.
That starts off with a “super turn” tactic that I picked up online when I was learning Madness in the Dark.
Back to personal psychology here: I’m an overly timid player who likes to explore and experiment with a certain set of blinders on. You know the axiom, “Scared money don’t make none?”
I’m a scarcity thinker who doesn’t see creative strategies in the card and action economy, especially when the game’s interlocking Horror Track, Bloodlust Track and Terror Deck start beating me up. Under these conditions, giving up something highly valuable to get something that’s even more valuable just doesn’t appear in my brain’s default pulldown menu. This urge is well-documented in psychological studies of the poor.
When I was first learning the Final Girl action steps, in my mind, a small hand of good cards had to work because each one felt precious to the little success story I’d written in my head, and when that story didn’t happen, the part of my brain that scans for creative tactical opportunities simply checked the fuck out.
The “super turn” concept was extremely counterintuitive to me. The person who posted about this tactic suggested that instead of bleeding out your first few small hands with must-make rolls, you just focus on reducing the Horror Track so by the time you get a bonus third die, you have a massive hand that you can execute almost at will — which works even better if you lead off the super turn by forcing a double success with the Improvise action.
You just have to tell your brain it’s OK to sweat out a few turns where you get little done, which the game’s constant pressure tricks players like me into not thinking about.
I was too proud to use this tactic at first because it felt like I was shortcutting to success. Instead of making delphic quips, Pops would have served me better by telling me it’s OK to raise your hand for help when you’re good and stuck.
So on that fourth or fifth game, with an extra die and a string of small actions at reach, Ava strolls into the shed, calmly assembles a spiked bat, walks out of the shed and demolishes her first Intruder without breaking a sweat.
It is late in the game and she’s already taken damage, so I use another trick I learned during pitched battles with the Ratchet Lady in Wolfe Asylum.
Ava starts redlining.
If your Horror Track is well under control, you get three dice for skill checks. Get down to one health, and you add a fourth adrenaline die, which makes you a dangerous wounded target.
This way you can goad your antagonist by lingering in the same room as them, looking beaten and pulpy, then pop a Retaliate card on ‘em, alternated with any attack cards you have at hand. The game breaks wide open. Ava wallops Trish and Zeke into a vapor with that bat. A Terror card effect sends Baghead right to Ava’s space the very next turn.
“Ohhh Baghead,” I say with a note of pity. “You picked the right one.” The weight of all those setup plays makes the dice feel like incipient thunder in my hand. All I have to do is throw the bolt from the high ground.
Except I roll a 1-1-1-4 on my Retaliate roll. I don’t even have the strength to get mad. I stare at the dice for 15 seconds, then reset the game.
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door - Call the goddamn coroner, got three stiffs for you courtesy of Ava’s newfound sangfroid.
The next game, I win my first contest in a blowout. I’m handed a magical opening sequence in the first few cards: a shotgun, components to build snare traps, and the Home Security event. Only a fool could squander a setup that juicy.
Between the snares, shotgun harassment, and the home security system, the Intruders can’t get into the house. Eleven victims get to eat Fiddle Faddle inside and laugh while Ava walks the home invaders down and sorts them out.
Et voila: I get to experience one of the Best Moments in Board Gaming, right up there with the castillo reveal in El Grande and the initial plane placement step of a Thunderbolt Apache Leader mission. I get to open the little envelope from the box. That little envelope that you can only open when your character survives a map for the first time.
Inside there’s Ava’s Spiked Bat and Porcupine, a baseball bat/garbage can lid combo, bristling with tenpenny nails. And it’s just a regular item that can be found with a search, you don’t even have to craft anything on the fly. That’s a sonafabitch right there — and perfect for the 2026 grad in your life. I’m not saying Ava has mastered this scenario, but she seems well over her freshman jitters.
There’s a 100% chance I set this up again first thing in the morning. The three-killer problem is vexing and chewy, the weapon-forging system is starting to show its charms. A big thing this game has going for it is that even when the tactical advantage of something isn’t obvious, you’re regaled with gobs of theme until insight catches up.
The event and item variety are still novel enough to bring regular surprises and shocks: I couldn’t believe starting my first game with Booby Trap, the event card that panics all the victims, and by the way, the outside of the house is booby trapped and you’re starting the game with a potential die-off even before you’ve plotted one turn. The next game, the neighbor special victim appeared, chatting everybody up in the living room with those boat keys in his pocket and the potential rush of safely seeing off a jackpot of victims from the lakefront.
Because exploration and situational flavor gradients are as important to me as “solving” the game, I know I can spend the next few weeks dashing to every corner and implication of this new batch of items, events, and tactics.
And after that? My first opportunity to “mix and match.”
Now that I’m in the two-movie club, I can start remixing locations and killers: What happens when I drop The Ratchet Lady from Madness in the Dark into Wingard Cottage? There are many more firsts waiting for me this year.
How do my two titles stand up against the rest of the Final Girl collection in terms of balanced challenge and system design? It’s unlikely that I’ll find out anytime soon.
The two boxes I have will keep me titillated for months. Picture a line graph in the shape of a long-sloped mountain, with the apex representing “getting it”: The long downslope is as delicious and leisurely as the climb is aggravating and painful.
From the high view, everything that can be said about Knock at the Door can be said about Madness in the Dark: It’s fussy, obstreperous, clever and rousing.
Each of these little boxes is a universe that I love to wind up again and again as they sputter, confound and explode — each time in a subtly different pattern. Like a lava lamp filled with chases and stabbings.
All these qualities make the Final Girl series the biggest “genre-breaker” I’ve experienced in years.
Horror doesn’t particularly interest me as a genre.
Plus I usually shun expansions or anything that has the whiff of subscription lock-in.
But I heard it was good, I wanted something different in the diet, and on that day I was at a proper game shop I knew I wasn’t going to be near again for several months, so I grabbed it.
Now it’s grabbed me. In a death grip of fun. What’s gonna happen next? What new tactical bank shots can I come up with in situations I would have considered beyond hope four games ago?
I’m gonna find out again. And again. And again. And again….
I got a buddy addicted to Final Girl and interviewed him about it.
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door’s First Turn is a Brutal Reunion With This System
By turn four, the trio of killers from Final Girl: A Knock at the Door have gone through the house like a thresher. Ava has to up her game.
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door - The Grad Party setup, with The Outsider (white meeple) hanging out in the bathroom. Trying to extract that victim before the trio of bastards at the bottom got to them cost Ava everything.
A scant four, maybe five, turns in to my first game of Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: Ava, our hero, is cornered in the garage of Wingard Cottage as all three intruders converge. The first blow reduces her health to less than half and she’s got no way to slow them down.
“Boy, I can’t wait to hit pause on SETI and get back into some Ameritrash!” Be careful what you wish for, asshole. It’s like the two-dozen-plus plays I logged with the Madness in the Dark movie meant nothing.
The trio of killers completely overwhelmed the map, killing all but two of the cottage’s innocent victims in a merry dash through the cottage driven by their early acquisition of the Coordinated Attack Dark Power — and amphetamines, which are handy for syncing a room-to-room murder spree, I’m told.
On top of this, my event card brought out a special victim called The Outsider. The killers are programmed to kill their way to this victim in a straight line. I was trying to get The Outsider off the map for my first sequence of plays, but one of the killers bum-rushed the room and slabbed them right in front of me. A poignant early setback.
Outside of saving two victims, the only thing Ava achieved was finding some discarded tools — which eventually could have been crafted into some cool weapons or traps, but that would have taken more time.
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door is based on The Strangers home invasion movie franchise. Emphasis on invasion, apparently. My first play gave me flashbacks of those nature films where a few hornets clear out a whole hive of bees in a few minutes.
Ever since I got my buddy Fritz hooked on Final Girl last year, I’ve been slowly shopping this runaway hit’s constantly expanding lineup of maps and villains: I finally opted for Knock at the Door because I liked this one’s twist. You have to thwart three killers at once with the option to rig up grisly homemade weapons from stuff you find around the house.
In my first setup of cards, it looked like I had the chance to eventually craft a thingamajig called The Obliterator. I’ve always wanted an Obliterator. Maybe next game.
So here we are again, back in the stew of Final Girl’s pressurized action, its intimate use of tropes to create variety, its humor and sudden collapses.
I reset the game immediately after Ava tapped out and expect to play several more times before Episode 113 (releasing end of March), where I promise you a fuller picture of my second dive into this franchise.
UPDATE: Several games later, I am handed a pile of gifts: the Security System event card back to back with the Battle Ready event card, which netted Ava a shotgun that she used twice on Zeke. He lived, but was susceptible to a polishing-off with a Weak Attack card. Even the Terror cards were helping: One produced three victims in the Boathouse, where Ava was already hefting her newfound bat.
The good breaks didn’t stop there: Ava had the ingredients to fashion snares. For several turns, the Intruders couldn’t get into the house and quickly exhausted targets outside of the house. That left them and Ava, her bat, and a no-nonsense alternating sequence of Furious Strike/Retaliate plays. There were 11 victims inside the house eating Fiddle Faddle and moving window to window as Ava mauled Trish, Zeke, and Baghead one by one.
What else happened? And how did this franchise bypass all my usual resistance to games with lots of expansions/constant releases?
Hear that story in Episode 113.
I got a buddy addicted to Final Girl and interviewed him about it.
Track of the Week Extended Remix: Tim’s Whole List of Hip Hop Suggestions
More reccos from Episode 112’s Track of the Week guest (Tim Sismey) with cuts from Prefuse 73, Company Flow, Grand Agent and more.
In Episode 112 I talked with my UK pal Tim Sismey about a track he recommended, which I loved: “Cordless Mics at 20 Paces” by DJ Skitz feat. Phi-Life Cypher.
This was occasion for him to spend time digging through a pile of things he hadn’t thought about or played for a long time.
Here’s Tim chatting about the UK scene and his adolescent path to hip hop addiction:
In the course of digging through tracks, he came up with a whole raft of gems that we couldn’t squeeze into the Track of the Week segment.
They fit here. Mucho gusto.
Collapsed Lung – Down With The Plaid Fad (XXLarge)
Blackalicious - Rhymes for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind
Killah Priest - Moanin' (Ft. Killa Sin)
Youngblood Brass Band - Avalanche
Company Flow - The Fire In Which You Burn
Grand Agent - Every Five Minutes
Vast Aire feat. Diverse - Big Game
C-Rayz Walz - Buck 80
Prefuse 73 feat. MF DOOM & Aesop Rock - Black List
Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience
SETI Board Game: Anatomy of a Turn (Turn One, Round 3)
I walk you through one turn vs. SETI’s automa (on easiest setting) during this solo session of the game.
“Good news!” wrote one Redditor when I posted my first SETI play report on a board game sub. “You have fundamentally misunderstood SETI and played a much worse game of your own invention instead of SETI, so you'll have more fun next time :)”
So with the catcalls from more experienced players ringing in my ears. I set the game back up on the easiest solo setting and walked it again.
Here’s a blow-by-blow video report of the first turn of Round 3.
EDIT: NOPE, I messed it up again. You get to launch a probe for one energy during a Scan action, not as a bonus launch during a Launch action. Had to watch my own work four times before I caught the mistake.
More thoughts on my first proper playthrough coming up March 15 in Episode 112.
Win my giveaway pile of indie tabletop charmers. Details in Episode 110. Listen here.
You’ve got until the end of March 2026 to enter: Win indie tabletop artifacts from Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games, The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, and Ada Press.
Three Boom-Bap Big-Crew Bangers You Might Not Have Heard Yet
A perfect three-song blend is the actual center of the universe. Everything else is bother and waste. Thanks for the set, lads.
One of the ways I defend myself from automated spectacles and simulation is digging back to artifacts I know I can trust.
One blessing about being a Gen Xer? I got to live half my life in the pre-internet era. I’ve got the frame of reference that helps me find and remember real-deal media, confident that the vibration I’m getting, even via YouTube ,came from human vocal chords and real people in a real neighborhood that jangled and whomped in a real place in time.
Nothing whomped better than that big-crew phase of boom bap that hit its peak around 1993-94. Think Leaders of the New School. Onyx. Fu-Schickens. Think massive snare hits yoked to a jazz bass sample and a chaser of echoing horns.
I thought I’d mapped all the major and minor points of the this microera when I picked my way past the most obvious plays and started adding tracks by outfits like Rumpletilskinz and Yaggfu Front.
I was just scratching the surface. Here for a jolt of authentic energy is a crew called Now Born Click, whose cassette EP goes for a lot of money on Discogs; I don’t think they hung around long enough to make an album.
Lace your Timbs up for this one:
Here’s another stomper for you: “Trouble Wreck” by the Troubleneck Brothers, all seven of them.
They got this one on rotation on Rap City, where you can see they’re running every part of the template, both in track production and video style, because it looks like they got half the city out for the take where they’re quasi-moshing for the shouted chorus. I still prefer the audio:
So you know Ice T, right? His production and rhyming posse was Rhyme Syndicate.
Somehow, there was a dude from the UK who was loosely affiliated with them named Red Venom.
Anyway, here’s a crew called Freakin Inglish from Salford & Manchester getting in on the act. I think they understood the assignment:
It takes a human guide to get to the best, I think still. Because while imaginationless AI hyperscalers ruin the future, they’re making unwelcome raids on memory, too.
Now I have to be careful when hunting down an old audiobook because they’re scraping my favorite novels and reading those with robots and doing cultural retrospectives whose scripts stink of LLM phraseology.
You’re better off trusting people for the good stuff.
Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience
NINJA BORG RPG Session: Kill Cheap Trick Live at Budokan
ACTUAL PLAY of NINJA BORG with game creators Walton Wood and Rugose Kohn. Mission: Get in a time machine. Get Applebee’s. Kill Cheap Trick.
Walton Wood and Rugose Kohn, the makers of NINJA BORG, let me come along for a special ninja mission that left me conflicted: Some degenerate record producer wanted to stick my and Rugose’s ninjas into a time machine so we could go back to 1978 and eliminate Chicago power-pop legends Cheap Trick right on stage during their career-resurrecting gig at Budokan in Japan.
With the boys’ help, I created a bitter former Applebee’s prep cook ninja (Maudy “Ultimate Trio” Yeggers aka Toxic Smoker the Laconic) who feels extremely put upon when the action compromises a) his smoke breaks b) his compulsion to keep eating the fare of his former employer. My teammate was Martoke “Karen” Tagit aka Festering Warlock the Punisher, who got excellent mileage out of the Roomba he rides around on.
With Walt guiding the action as the Motherfuckin’ Ninja Master and Rugose ensuring my incessant dialog didn’t make the action sag, we got about the business of the game’s bloody combat and hyperconductive silliness.
The complete audio of this event is below.
Maudy “Ultimate Trio” Yeggers: NINJA BORG character sheet. I didn’t draw my guitar, but it broke anyway.