Crate Digging: December 2025

4 of Breakup Gaming Society’s Favorite Finds on the Internet

🎙️ What Am I Rolling? I ran across Fiona K.T. Howat’s solo TTRPG playthroughs in the course of learning more about the Long Haul ‘83 game. What you’ve got in Howat is an expert wielder of audio who paints a table, what’s on it, and her string of roleplay choices with warmth, wonder, and lucidity. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about what a solo TTRPG session feels like, you couldn’t ask for a better guide.

🎵 “Dark in My Heart,” Lee Hazlewood A production, songwriting, and arrangement legend puts one of the funniest and most bitter songs you’ve ever heard over a rollicking tambourine and some simple picking. A sliver of sunlit instruments briefly lights up the head of a narrator who sounds like he’s working on a 7 a.m. drunk in a rank North Hollywood bar.

🎙️ How’s It Goin’ Fucker? Trinidad, Colorado doesn’t have many podcasts, but probably the most infamous was made by Dave Gutierrez and Glenn Walters, who teamed up to do this epic and violent journey of a friendship. How’s it Goin Fucker? never really got off the ground. Pete and Glenn were lifelong friends who spent enough time on YouTube to think they could “get in on this Internet podcasting thing,” but the “episodes” consisted only of a few promo teasers of them driving around the Trinidad-Raton area, likely north of .08 BAC, with a camera pointed out the window, shouting the show’s title at people. You think you’d get tired of seeing downtrodden pedestrians gaping at the camera, but I’ve watched all the promos at least five times. They made dozens of these and claimed an auto body shop was their sponsor, but I don’t know.

Dave and Glenn’s friendship was a weft of brotherly feuds that flared up in the potentially lethal and sometimes ingenious second incarnation of the “show”: Glenn got hopping mad at Dave over a weekend house-sitting debacle that involved a suppressed .22 rifle, a starlight scope, and a mound of trophies, some of which may or may not have been neighbors’ pets. Their content scheme devolved to a pretty popular series called Bet You Can’t Get Out from Under This, Fucker — an escalating duel of trap-setting capers. The capstone was Glenn luring Dave into an abandoned coal camp-era schoolhouse and collapsing the entire second floor on him. This is documented in some detail in a series of stories that tripled street sales of the Trinidad Chronicle-News.

After multiple surgeries for Dave and a speedy trial for Glenn, both had time to reflect. Their rapprochement resulted in the poignant third incarnation of the show. I Miss You, Fucker features Dave reading Glenn’s letters from Trinidad Correctional Facility from the comfort of his therapeutic scooter, which features a large picture of Glenn on the back strap. Because Dave spent two weeks watching YouTube Shorts about Chinese influence on YouTube, he has deleted the channel. But if you ever see him motoring down Commercial St. and you hear a lot of “How’s it goin’ fucker?” being shouted across the thoroughfare, don’t fret, it’s all love.

♣️ 52 Duels The ingenious Postmark Games boys are at it again, spinning off a deck dueling game from their affordable and clever 52 Realms Adventures dungeoncrawler. If you like to battle your friends and just want a game — as opposed to a giant, litigious casino that just happens to contain a game — here’s one of the off-ramps from being a Wizards of the Coast paypig.

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Hear my sessions from Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts.

Hear my sessions from Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts.

Final Girl: A New Player Arms Himself With the Funk, Is Murdered

This is adapted from the script of Episode 105, “Final Girl: Killer from Tomorrow vs. Madness in the Dark,” which you should check out if you want to hear full audio of the pre- and post-game interviews I did with Fritz.

Final Girl is back on the table. Not just for replay value, but because I showed it to a non-tabletop buddy and he was sprung on sight.

In Episode 105 you can hear what happens as one dude in Wyoming struggles against a robot killer for the very first time and another dude in Colorado reacquaints himself with the joys of finding a hook-handled bone hammer in a utility closet.

Final Girl Killer from Tomorrow: Fritz got two successes on a search and found a Craig Mack CD in the used bin at the Sunny Days Mall

Most of the time when you tell people you play solo boardgames, you are met with bemusement and pity.

I think people understand in the abstract that there are all kinds of things that are cool to do with a group or by yourself. Hell, even sex has a pretty decent solo mode. But for some reason, solo board gaming registers as a preference for the lost and the eccentric.

But sometimes the light flips on and all your feverish elevator pitches for solo boardgaming are vindicated.

Friend of the show and occasional Breakup Gaming Society contributor Fritz Godard visited Starkville this summer, and, after several beers and a smoked chicken, he told me that out of all the games he’s heard me discuss on the show, Final Girl was the one that intrigued him the most. 

So I got my base game and Madness in the Dark module out and we played a few turns. Within a few weeks he had his own base game and the Killer from Tomorrow module, one of dozens of movie-inspired scenarios you can take on in Final Girl.

“I didn’t know a board game could do that,” he told me later.

So we did two interviews in the lead-up to Halloween: Fritz was up in Wyoming with his Killer from Tomorrow movie set up for the very first time. I was here in Starkville. The idea was to compare his very first look at the game with my umpteenth trip through the grimy halls of Wolfe Asylum.

Fritz is such a beautiful anachronistic kind of guy. Before we started our games, he sent me a pic of Craig Mack CD from 1994 that he was about to throw in his boombox.

This is not a retro hipster pose. He’s the kind of dude who genuinely gets more joy from the pages of a yellowed second-hand paperback than he does from being online.

I think we both feel misplaced in this century and susceptible to the charms of physical media: Like spending an evening getting your ass absolutely kicked in a shopping mall while being hunted by a robotic assassin.

Fritz didn’t have enough trust with the Savior (a.k.a. the young John Connor), so the punk forced him to pitch his only weapon card. Fritz really needed that gun.

A few nights after our pre-game call, I checked back in with Fritz to see how his first battle in Sunnyvale Mall went. Did his attraction to the concept survive the level of detail and general difficulty of surviving as a Final Girl?

It did. I was satisfied to hear that he’d gotten his head around a lot of the game’s many wrinkles and had notched the honor of his first lopsided loss. It was heartwarming, like watching your kid get his first concussion in a Pop Warner league.

This franchise seems to still be pulling new players deep inside its clever, magnetic VCR-style game boxes.

If I’m reading the online chatter correctly, Final Girl recently became the first solo-only board game design to break the BoardGameGeek Top 100. Congrats to the team at Van Ryder games for that one. I also raise a bruised fist for all the Final Girls out there and wish Fritz many more good deaths.

I am also going to try new interesting ways to die: Cycling this on the table again inspired me to get the Knock at the Door movie, based on The Strangers’ home-invasion situation. Stay tuned this winter for a glimpse of what that’s like.

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May I send you a custom cocktail booklet and this handsome frog?

Resist! Replays: An Evening with Guinness and the Spanish Resistance

Have you ever suspected that the true purpose of a vacation is to simply remind you of how good it is to be home, even if home is a snarl of repairs beyond your ability to cope?

I walk in after a day of packing, driving, errands, driving some more and are reminded of the scent of my place. It’s not so bad, but I left stuff strewn everywhere before heading for Denver and it’s simply time to crack that Guinness, work the wrap off the neck of the Basil Hayden bottle, straighten up a bit, and not worry about tomorrow’s high-interest demands on the soul.

I love a stout on a cool evening. It’s a counterintuitive play on the surface: You ingest something cold and midnight black that brings a bit of blood to the skin, as if your body is finding equilibrium with cold and has made a friend of the night. Like at atmospheric protection suit that unfolds from inside you. The suit performs even better when you back up a sip of the stout with a nip of Basil Hayden here and there.

I haven’t had a drink outside of a Michelob Ultra in two months, so I’m getting reacquainted with all kinds of old smells and tastes: I’d forgotten that even Guinness had layers to it and how beguilingly soft Basil Hayden was on its approach. Together, they’re a triumph of both contrasting and complementary colors and textures.

The hematoma I got in the hotel shower my last day in Denver hurts less, although I’m still discombobulated from the driving in that city. I was constantly trying to square the overlay of memories from all its neighborhoods I knew with the rude jutting-out of new developments that erupted…in between them? Over the top? I couldn’t tell sometimes. The crawl of taillights is still burned on my retinas, like I’m half-caught in a spectral afterlife where everybody is waiting to turn left.

AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie” pops up the speakers, then some Rival Consoles. It all feels dovetailed by a fine carpenter. I decide to take a few more runs at Resist!, which I featured in Episode 101. Quick refresher: It’s a solo card game where you have to manage a roster of Spanish guerrillas — or maquis — who are trying to topple General Franco after WWII against frightful odds.

I’ve played dozens of games since that episode. I’m proud to say I’ve achieved basic operational confidence. I ironed out a handful of minor edge cases that slowed play, but the process of picking maquis, analyzing their abilities and picking the right mission continually turned my brain into a brown, wet tangle. For most of these plays I’ve been on that rookie plateau where I’m getting draws or straight-out losing from being reckless. I needed some kind of heuristic for not stalling out on this important step.

But I had a breakthrough last week. Out of nowhere, I got the second-highest rated win: a Major Victory. My deck drafting strategy had paid off: I’d focused mostly on two kinds of recruits: maquis who had high attack value while hidden and maquis who could stir or manipulate the deck with their Hidden ability. 

My simple draft formula:
• Prioritize maquis who had a 2 attack value in Hidden Mode
• Of the others, try to get a 1:1 mix of maquis who can scout and those who can manipulate the hand/deck in some way
• Always pass on Abel and Adela for the starting crew, they feel too specialized for the opening game

Check the trophy case: My maquis went ham and knocked down a ton of missions after weeks of getting my ass kicked by this game

The idea was to be able to take down the first couple missions without having to use any of my crew’s powerful Revealed abilities. Using these abilities can save you from mission failure. Using them also exposes their identities to Franco’s men and removes them from your deck, starting the desperate downward slide that shrinks and shrinks your pool of operatives as the missions get harder. Good solo games always create scarcity, but watching these endearing cartoon insurgents dribble out of play is one of the most anxious flavors of “not enough” that I’ve felt in a long time.

Instrumental to this rare win was the bookish Roberto, who attacks for two while remaining hidden on a mission and can weed tough units out of the enemy deck so that the defending garrisons are weakened on future missions. I haven’t been able to duplicate it since with the same drafting strategy, but it was still thrilling, like stepping onto a tennis court and, out of nowhere, just thrashing the highest-rated player at the club.

Now that I’m over the shame of feeling morally inadequate for playing a game about resistance in an era where there’s not enough of it, I’m fully into the very tough puzzle that Resist! gives you. As far as theme and mechanics go, the futility of the post-Spanish Civil War resistance hits you full in the face as you try to reason your way through which gambles to take as you scramble up a jagged, freezing ridge called Not Enough.

But it feels like there’s enough tonight. I return to the table late in the game after some more straightening and find that I’ve bashed my way through a pretty impressive run of missions and there are only two missions left. 

My maquis have executed a successful border crossing, seized a farmhouse, destroyed a supply convoy, kidnapped a key officer, stolen supplies from a train depot, knocked out a bunker, and even attacked Franco’s headquarters. I bet that was a tasty pre-dawn surprise for him. I use the game option to end the Resistance, as I suspect the next draw will be clogged with Franco’s spies and the mission will fail.

I leave the second goblet of Guinness I poured on the counter untouched. This all feels like enough for the night. 

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May I send you a custom cocktail booklet and this handsome frog?

Congrats to Our Namer of Drinks

Nice Online Person Submits Winning Name for Skrrt_Vonnegut’s Plum-and-Whiskey Concoction: The Icebox

Back in October our Chief Mixologist, Skrrt_Vonnegut had infused himself into a corner and we needed help naming one of his concoctions: a whiskey-and-plum-liqueur affair built on liqueur he made himself using plum trees from Pop’s yard.

Then the contest started: Name the drink and get some swag in the mail from Breakup Gaming Society. A lot of people dug the origin story and plum themes dominated the entries.

Referencing William Carlos’ Williams famous poem produced a winner: The Icebox, submitted by Not Invented Here on Discord. They’re getting a Defiant Frog sticker and whatever else we can stuff in an envelope and mail to the UK.

Skrrt made the final decision after some comparison of “top three” lists because he liked the classic, simple sound of it.

Runners-Up That Made the Decision Tough

The Bruised Husband (Absolute art from Boogie Nights Errant)

Blurry Orchard (Very clever, Dave)

Damson in Distress (Good one, Jamie, Skrrt loved this because these are the plums he uses)

Anyway here’s the recipe for The Icebox:
• 1 part plum liqueur
• 1 part rye or blended whiskey
Preparation: Pour rye and liqueur over one large ice cube in rocks glass, garnish with high-quality preserved cherry

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Support the show and get a bonus Skrrt_Vonnegut drink recipe.

Support the show and get a bonus Skrrt_Vonnegut drink recipe.

Crate Digging: November 2025

3 of Breakup Gaming Society’s Favorite Finds on the Internet

🎙️ War With a Mate: These two UK dudes had the rapport, agility and wit to launch a successful show about anything they wanted. Thankfully they chose to document their joy and struggles with learning The Campaign for North Africa, possibly the longest and most complex hex-and-counter wargame ever produced. Part of the gag is they’ve never tried anything heavier than D&D, but this isn’t a stunt. You get to hear them turn into real generals as they lock horns and slowly master this WW2 leviathan. They also tack on cool history lessons and segments for gentle riffing. Congrats in advance on Episode 50, fellas.

🎵 Jeep Beat Collective’s “The Bomb Drops” routine. An uptempo real-needle-on-the-wax scratching seminar set to a sped-up “Sing a Simple Song” drum break, Shaft guitars and other gems. I’m listening to it two or three times every night.

🎙️ Flail to the Face: “Fair warning,” intones GM/host Kevin in the kickoff to Season 2, “the Diaper Swamp isn’t for everybody.” Both ribald and polished, FttF brings together clever players who know how to voice characters and contextualize at speed over playful atmospherics. The new season brings pro-level work in Human Occupied Landfill, a 1994 game that puts the cast on a brutal penal colony that’s also the galaxy’s garbage dump.

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Get the Breakup Gaming Society cocktail booklet.

Get the Breakup Gaming Society cocktail booklet.

Wild and Plucky Indie TTRPGs You Could Be Playing Instead of D&D

An Unranked, Curated TTRPG Recco Series With Editor, Reviewer and Player Walton Wood

Meeting Walt of Līber Lūdōrum and The Bogfolk Collective gave Breakup Gaming Society a more passionate and discerning window into the vibrant, freewheeling world of indie TTRPGS. Following are Walt’s criteria for featured games — and capsules of our ongoing series of interviews about them.

1) It has to be an RPG

Calling something an RPG has become a marketing gimmick, and that often goes hand in hand with a neglect (sometimes even a self-righteous refusal) to critically examine what actually distinguishes an RPG from other types of formalized games (and also from abstract play and other media that mimic them). For my purposes here, an RPG has to be played through a conversation that is supplemented with some formal rules rather than being played exclusively through the formal rules themselves (as board and card games are).

Needless to say, it also needs to be playable—otherwise, it’s experimental literature using the game-manual genre and form. It also has to give you an actual role to play, distinguishing it from language games like the elegant corpse game. Ideally, the formal mechanics will support and reward roleplaying, though this often isn’t the case—but we can dream.

2) It has to be indie

Defining what makes a game “indie” is a lot murkier than establishing a basic working definition of RPGs. The true, hardcore indie games are made by a few scrappy nonprofessionals laboring nights and weekends, embracing the DIY ethos inspired by music subcultures in the days before the internet, but it also includes organizations like small co-ops and publishing houses. For the sake of breadth, I’m going to at least consider anything that isn’t churned out by a major publisher (the Wizards of the Coasts, Paizos, Chaosiums, etc. of the world) to be indie even though it may not fit neatly into the traditional image of indie creation.

3) It probably has a “gimmick”

By gimmick, I mean a unique aspect or approach that provides a hook and makes the game stand out from the vast, vast sea of noise that is indie RPG publishing. It could be a novel mechanical approach, a meaningful gamification of real-world issues, a clever implementation of a high concept, or anything else that sets it apart from the herd of heartbreakers.

4) It has to be something I haven’t discussed extensively before

I know a lot of words, and I’ve used most of them to analyze and comment on games over on my own blog, Liber Ludorum, and the companion podcast, Loqui Ludos. I’ve already given plenty of gems their due attention, so I’m going to avoid double dipping. If you like what I have to say on the show, though, please do click your way over to LL and check out any articles that strike your fancy.

5) It has to be something I wasn’t involved in producing

I work full time in game publishing, and my CV is now well over 10 pages long. In most cases, I work on commission and make no residual income based on sales, so there’s usually not many conflicts of interest.* But I am inherently biased toward projects that I’ve contributed to, so I want to keep my rose-colored glasses stowed when talking about games here.

*Breakup Gaming Society overrode this rule on a couple occasions because Walt creates and edits interesting games we wanted to hear about. - Ed.

6) It can’t be the work of a douchebag

There are some really amazing, wonderful people in the RPG scene, and I’m fortunate enough to work with many of them. I’ve also worked with a few really horrible motherfuckers, and I know the dirt on even more of them, some of whom I’ve had the misfortune of casually interacting with. Long and short, if the creator is a verifiable walking, talking piece of human shit, I’m not going to promote their game, no matter how well crafted and compelling it may be.

Carolina Death Crawl
Bully Pulpit Games

A Southern Gothic card-driven and GM-less roleplaying game set during the American Civil War. Only one of you is going to live. Discussed in Episode 96: Carolina Death Crawl RPG (Lemonade Beer Punch Sold Separately)

Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel
SandroAD

The future is here, the bills are due, and we can’t pay ‘em. Time to harvest organs. All kinds of organs in Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel, discussed in Episode 100: Pyrotechnics Review, Playing With Dystopia, Surrendering Secret Wars

Lichoma
Bogfolk, Strega Wolf van den Berg

Learn what to expect from life in The Wen — a collapsing city where meat is the last remaining unit of economic value. Lichoma is beautifully conceived and fearsome to consider. Discussed in Episode 104: Lichoma TTRPG Deep-Dive Interview + SETI Preview

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Hear my work with the Dwelling solo journaling RPG.

Hear my work with the Dwelling solo journaling RPG.

Dwelling Solo RPG Session 5: Eyes of a Boring God

This is the Foyer scene generated from the prompts on pages 36-39 of Dwelling, a solo journaling RPG about facing spirits and memories in a haunted house. Listen to what happened in the previous room here.

FOYER & FRONT DOOR

The Conjure and Remember prompts at the threshold of the house offered much leeway for looking forward and back, inside and out. Our narrator sees what he fears is the neighborhood’s patron saint outside, and remembers a rupture from inside that, in part, made him the tenant of this house.

Conjure

The street at night usually delivers a measure of serenity, or at least a kind of peaceful weight: A slumbering electric village that blots out the stars in accord with the leaves that bob under streetlights.

I spot my Jetta on the curb, still new enough not to look tatty. It is hard to enjoy. I’m certain that every wall in back of me is made of pasteboard, actors moving in on me and demanding my undoing with some innocent-sounding request. Somebody turns the corner toward me from the dining room, advances, resets and enters again. This loop is running several times a second.

The Vogelsons got one of the first MINI Coopers in the neighborhood and they’ve parallel parked it right in back of the Jetta. Today the light hit just so on the cottonwood that guards the Jetta, so I thought I would sit on the trunk and watch the evening fill in, but once in place I realized I was just a guy trying to watch himself watch something, like a friend who keeps calling out parts of a song that you can’t wait to be over.

All I could think about was how depressing it was to sit in a neighborhood full of married people with chalky legs who puttered around in striped jean shorts. You think one of them could have a decent ass, that would add some property value at least. Sometimes I’ll hear snatches of the music they play and it’s even worse. I write notes in my head that the spouses could leave in marker on the fridge: “I can no longer bargain my way around the fact that I married into no ass,” just a single capital letter for the signature and then nobody sees them again, they’re off to the Merchant Marines.

So I tried re-posing in this late afternoon portrait in my head, went inside to dust off my pants, came back out and wiped down the trunk of the car and took the perch again, but I gave up because what kind of gimcrack theater was I trying to put on here. There’s nothing to look at once the cigarette’s over. 

Can I request a Groundhog Day loop where you don’t learn anything, just emerge on a fall evening after one of those naps that are so restorative that you feel like you’ve been saved from an alarm bell that’s been playing in your head for days? Emerge from the house, have the first smoke of the early evening, arc the butt out into the street and there you are, emerging onto the front porch again.

With my ass on the trunk and my feet on the bumper, the only thing I could see were several hours of dappled joblessness, each house bleached to a jealous idiocy, no arrivals or entrances worth a moment’s rise of the heart: I was fucking marooned.

After the most recent layoff — my third in two years — something turned. As if some unconscious group urge to self-preservation, the last of my drug buddies disbanded. There weren’t any fights. Nobody ODed, although it was always a possibility. It just broke like a bubble that couldn’t stand its own tension. 

I don’t miss the mornings with my nose crusted up, crashing and wondering how anyone was going to get home without getting arrested or searched under the informant sun…wasn’t anybody going to say anything? One morning we’d wrapped up about 9:30 on the 14th floor of whatever building we ended up in after last call and we rode down in the same elevator as a guy fresh up and ready to go with a spendy road bike. He could have said something, just turned and said it and saved us eight months.

We made it to the parking lot and Ember said she would drive me home, but then took me all the way out to Lakeside Moors. I begged as she kept making the wrong turns until we were on I-70 West, wheedling me the whole time. Took me to the suburbs, my socks slick with foot muck inside my dress shoes, got vodka out and started inviting people over.

Now I see the face: Once your eyes map a face in the night boughs, you’ll start searching it out whether you want to see it or not; mine is a giant or golem with a steam shovel jaw. When a light breeze moves the branch of his lower face, it looks like he’s chewing. This filled me with loathing the first time I saw it and I nicknamed him Diln.

Diln, I could feel, was the god-mascot of this block, presiding over the milky cloistering of those who didn’t realize the prelude — before everybody sorted themselves into dependable breeding and economic teams — was the show.

Diln had never heard of the nights through which we used to roll like marbles. Where he presides, there isn’t even a word for them. Back then there were no faces to look for in the green, black and yellow canopies of Lower Downtown. 

O Diln, father of the bland new sect, I was ever your herald. I knew somehow you were coming to exsanguinate the night when my late 20s started slipping out of my fingers and I kept hearing yet another ex had a baby with the very next guy they met after me. Three in a row.

Diln, they are your wards now; guard them well from your throne in the branches as they push their strollers home with sore tits. Soon the kids will be old enough for a babysitter and they can go to the community center and see acoustic sets from washouts for $15.

I’m going to strike tomorrow when the sun blots your outline. I’m going to cut that branch off, then we’ll see who wants to make faces in the dark.

Remember

I was 28, a few years before I became the occupant here and a few years after I learned I could parlay my final heartbreak from AB into a multi-year tear across town and gorge on her many, many proxies, drunk and skied out of my face the whole time. Peak earnings, too, I was dressing like a whole different genus out there and the right people noticed.

One morning I’d kicked some of the right people out of my apartment around 7 a.m. and had almost drunk my way to a thin sort of sleep by around 10 when the call from Mom came. Could I be ready ASAP, she and Tom were coming to get me because there was trouble with J.

A three-hour drive, reeking and strung out in the cat hair all over the back seat, every color bulging and smearing outside the window, I mistook the car’s chassis for my own skin, braced for impact or humiliation several times a minute. I think I was slurring when my stepdad, Tom, tried to make small talk. He was into fly fishing.

Mom was too focused on the mission to interrogate me, there wasn’t a dram of blood in her hands as she clamped the wheel: Beverly had rung Mom 45 minutes before Mom roused me. Beverly was leaving J and there was some kind of scene at J’s house when she tried to extract her stuff and could we help. 

Maybe Mom and Tom could help. When a piece of gravel popped off the windshield or she changed lanes, I dug my feet into the floormats. I would have traded the souls of anyone in that car for a hamburger and a shake and sleep but maybe first getting my dick sucked in a dark and well-appointed hotel room it wasn’t too much trouble. Tom kept asking me questions in between patting Mom’s leg. My answers got shorter and shorter until he gave it up.

We got there and had a brief huddle with Beverly and some blinking avian who I guessed was from her book club. I’d met some of them before, but I didn’t exactly keep a logbook of people in bad shirts who carried Ziploc bags of almonds around.

Inside J was cutting a rigid back-and-forth pattern between the kitchen and the dining room. His eyes had a preternatural extra layer of white around the pupil and iris. He picked at the back of his hands. A queen mattress was jammed on end halfway down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs a wire statuette picador sat on the floor, bent cruelly at the waist.

He talked in a register I’d never heard as the room sharpened and contracted; my hamstrings were so tight with dehydration, I couldn’t even sweat: “She thinks she can talk like that to me like a clinician I’m not her fucking patient talk to me like that…”

I stood with Mom and Tom for several minutes of this before retreating to the entrance of his neat Tudor and straddled the door jamb, one foot on the porch and one on the hardwood like a sentry weighing the upside of getting executed for desertion. Beverly’s torso and folded arms were visible in a break through the leaves where she stood and talked to her book club buddy.

“…managing that place for those corpses and she piles up student debt and writes that shit and I cook and I cook…” I heard him say before the voice trailed back into the kitchen.

I couldn’t hear what Mom was saying, her voice low flat like it gets when she’s upset and trying to rein it in, the rhythm of sensible questions being repeated to a hurricane.

“SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING” Yowls and sobs after. I’d never heard such a sound, Beverly milling around on the sidewalk, me spanning two hells over the kick plate of the entryway. “A SANDWICH IS BEYOND HER A SANDWICH AND SHE’S GOING TO COME IN HERE AND STEAL FROM ME”

Some people will have a morning like that and back off drugs. I backed off Uncle J. I couldn’t have that shit, I needed my beauty rest, green curry, and donuts so I could recharge in time to get all banged up at a rooftop bar on Sunday.

I finally slept on the ride back to Denver.

Next: First Floor

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Alula’s Top 8 Podcasts: A Magical Continent Strip-Mines Itself for Content

Alula, a hidden land that reveals itself to travelers in the Faraway card game, has now become an ecotourism paradise. The residents have changed as the place comes to grips with an influx of wiry fintech people in Mercedes-Benz sprinter vans, bringing with them what might be the modern analog to blankets infected with smallpox: podcasts.

Dornackl now makes jerky out of endangered animals, but he’s doing numbers

My last visit there, I saw my first boutique store run by a transplant and everybody had started a damn Ululu podcast. I had to listen to a lot of them because it would have been rude not to, so for better or worse, here are my reviews of Ululu’s Top 8 Podcasts:

1) That Uddu That You Do, hosted by Dornackl of the Desert 
Listen, I have no shaman-level knowledge of the folk medicine of Alula, but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to carve pieces off an Uddu stone and use them in a proprietary burger sauce recipe. My last stop was 24+ hours in the desert, 6 of which I spent watching Dusteen carve off pieces of it, mash them up with Okiko fat, and rant about how his clan was the worthiest of all the desert folk. His mic wasn’t even on. I think the worst part was when the light went out of the stone and it stopped hovering and crashed to the floor, that was the most demoralizing thing I think I’ve ever seen.

2) Daily Mushroom Forest Thoughts
My host played me an episode and the podcast started out with an ad for Red Robin because they’re hosting it on LibSyn. I don’t even know how that’s possible. And I’m not good at hiding my reaction to stuff, that was a long fuckin’ 1 hour 37 minutes, I can tell you that.

3) I Still Don’t Know How to Pronounce This Podcast’s Name and I’m Not Going to Try
I did a pit stop in a town where I saw my old two-headed pals, Klasaatz and Klaaseesin — or is it “pal”? I never quite grasped their conception of singular vs. plural. Anyhow, Klasaatz remembers details with eidetic clarity and Klaaseesin has a gift for interpretation and context. They’re like the play-by-play and color commentary team on an NFL broadcast, except they’re talking about all the people who move through their stacked pueblo of houses during the summer. At one point I appeared in one of the recollections and they reminded me about why I first came here. The live episode I saw them record was 8 eight hours long. Absolutely hypnotic. Five stars.

Maybe you’re just not spiritually evolved enough to afford the Tier 1 personal coaching package

4) Breath of the Okiko
I think the general problem with becoming a solo version of a media network is that your broadcast time and release schedule far outstrip your ability to meaningfully populate it. Turn on your local news during a flood or fire, they will have a couple poor schmucks at major intersections bouncing back and forth between graphics and the studio team for hours with no new information. The urgency is the information. “As you can see, there are some emergency vehicles moving around in back of me…” That’s what Breath of the Okiko tries to do, except it’s about a self-absorbed former tourist who settled here and now they’re trying to one-up everybody else for authenticity and turning every damn thing they see into some tarted up tale of transformation. Even back home, I get very nervous about people who advertise how centered and virtuous and empathetic they are right up front. People who do this are usually hopelessly lost or they’re hoping you are so you’ll buy their three-tier Alula Self-Actualization Coaching Package. Fuuuuuck that.

5) The Stave and the Garland
From the banks of a pristine river, this host talks over the ambient sound of moving water on the banks near where they practice martial arts. I tried to sit in for a bit of it and I have to say, I think I cracked a rib, but it still felt somehow playful. There’s one episode and so far it’s 136 hours, 28 minutes and climbing. They’ve definitely got the ASMR listener segment dialed in.

6) The Shifting Lands
I’d never considered double-decker teasers with the intro music. The first cold-open teaser made me feel a bit pandered to, but if you’re podcasting, it’s a very hard tactic to resist: “A missing donation box. A quiet town torn apart. Find out what happens when you don’t stay out of Riverdale.” But what I liked here is how the host flips the setup right into the first tale, which centered on Ululu’s forest taxonomy, which I never get tired of hearing about. It’s pretty slick.

7) Journeyed
Another dickhead for whom the most fascinating thing about Alula is…them. The intro was so laden with tautological statements, I actually whimpered a bit around the 2:48 mark, which got me a nasty stare. The show description has typos in it. Horseshit like this is one of the reasons nobody believes anything anymore.

Third question in every conversation ever is “Do you like hip hop?” Say no.

8) Crappshawn’s House of Bars
You know that look when you’re talking with somebody at a party who works at a dab store and hangs out with dab people who live the dab life but it’s still a fairly cool conversation until you realize they’re about to rap? It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Colorado or Alula, the few seconds of body language and the way they look into your eyes is universal and you think, “Oh God, please don’t rap,” and then they rap and you put your hands in your pockets and stare at your shoes and bob your head once in a while because they’re looking at you the whole time and gesticulating in your face? All I’m saying is please don’t rap, especially to a guest who’s trapped in your yurt for the night. You don’t have any bars and it’s not cool. Please don’t rap.

Cave Evil Resurrected: Interview With Co-Designer Nate Hayden

I made contact with fellow Coloradan Nate Hayden — one of Cave Evil’s three designers — and interviewed him about the re-release of his crew’s 2011 cult hit. This is adapted from Episode 103: “Cave Evil Reprint: The Resurrection of the Pedal-to-the-Metal Cult Hit”

When Cave Evil surfaced in 2011, it stopped me cold. I’d never seen anything like it. Our household was cutting our teeth on our first batch of Fantasy Flight designs, with their slick illustrations and rich color gradients, and here was a big box of all-black components with all-white art looking like a year’s worth of flyers and album covers for thrash bands.

I considered buying it, forgot about it, and the next time I looked, copies were going for hundreds of dollars because the first printing sold out fast. Longtime battle buddies and designers Nate Hayden, Mat Brinkman, and Jochen Hartmann had pulled off a beautiful coup in indie board gaming: They decided to just make a game they wanted to play and trusted the living hell out of the dream.

Their people across the world jumped at the opportunity for this rollicking incursion of Stygian death:

In Cave Evil, each player takes the role of an ancient Necromancer. Located deep within an earth, their Necropolises have now merged, each seeking the Darkest Pit, the location of all evil. The dark wizards must build minions with precious resources from their Lairs to send forth and destroy, or dig further tunnels to locate other creatures, resources or to ambush another sorcerer.

The game is won when only one remaining Necromancer stands. A Necromancer can either be destroyed by combat, or an enemy minion may venture into their Lair and crush the wizard's shadow power, a Chthonic Crystal. BUT an even greater darkness may befall the players. As they build and destroy creatures the Dark Pit absorbs the shadowflame and may awaken the ultimate cave evil.

During our talk, Nate described it as a “weekend game.” Clear the calendar. Tunnel doggedly away from what is fashionable and optimized. Battle your friends. Stop for pizza. Battle some more. I’m jealous of this group, frankly.

We discussed the group’s decision to re-issue this game during COVID and how the act of design is driven by these long friendships and the process of constant play:

One of my favorite board game writers, Charlie Theel of the Player Elimination blog, talked about Cave Evil this way in 2014 on BoardGameGeek: “Cave Evil is raw and brutal. It features exceptional black and white artwork fused with mechanics that bury the player in the dripping blood and ichor of theme. It’s the only game that has a trailer and an online radio stream dedicated to setting the atmosphere. It’s weird, obtuse, and unforgettable.”

The world of Cave Evil kept growing after 2011 as the group built growing battlespaces by fusing existing and prototype maps together and saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an item that…” The Warcults expansion came out in 2016, followed by a number of Chaos Packs.

The Skeletal Monstrosity, which comes with the Crypt City release: Looks like you better deploy it before another necromancer does.

After our talk, Nate’s team wanted to call out one in particular: Crypt City. The Crypt City add-on works with both the Cave Evil and Warcults properties. From the product description:

Built of molten corrupted steel the Undead have designed a labyrinthian tomb - Marching armies of the dead, mazes of tunnels, sarcophaguses sit ready to be raided for treasure. Tonight, Necromancers and Warlords descend upon CRYPT CITY!

Crypt City is issue #1 of Corroded Corridor. Corroded Corridor issues will center on variations of play for the base games Cave Evil and/or Warcults. Issues will most often feature different maps, but some issues may feature new base games or even brief Campaign and Path variations of play.

In Crypt City player raid a territory of the Undead species, seeking to plunder tombs for potential treasure of creatures, but many evils may be unearthed. New Dwellers, Protectors, Ancient Artifacts, Endgames and more!

So thanks to Nate for the chat and a salute to his crew for making this “weekend game.”

If you’ve got a weekend group that wants to vanish underground with you, take a look at Cave Evil before it vanishes beneath the earth for what will likely be the final time.

J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: My Curated Simile Collection

The brisk tenor and the perfect sentences of the free reading of J.G. Ballard’s first novel, The Drowned World (1962), found me ripe for hypnosis: Its post-apocalyptic lagoons; its mad insects and teeming, oversized reptiles ascendant on the food chain once more; and how the resurgence of primordial environments rewrites the psychology of protagonist Dr. Kerans, his peers at the testing station and the military detachment sent to safeguard the operation.

The scope and particulars of this haunting and sublime upheaval stick in Ballard’s extraordinary passages of scene-setting and its constituent sentences: Rhythmically varied; coolly precise in their application of architectural, biological, geological, and psychological terminology; haunted with restrained poetry and dread lucidity — many of the best capped by striking and effective similes.

What follows is a collection of those sentences I harvested after getting hold of my own paperback copy, each with a bit of context about the scene. I felt compelled to collect them and am confident these samples justify the effort.

🚨 Some Plot Spoilers🚨

In Chapter 1, the narrator finds the main character, Dr. Kerans, who has taken over a room in a partially submerged luxury hotel as his own apartment: “The Ritz’s reputation, he gladly agreed, was richly deserved—the bathroom, for example, with its black marble basins and gold-plated taps and mirrors, was like the side-chapel of a cathedral.”

We are soon shown one of many unforgettable snapshots of the bases’ lagoon and the ever-present, ineluctable main force of the book: the sun. “Golden waves glimmered up into the boiling air, and the ring of massive plants around them seemed to dance in the heat gradients like a voodoo jungle.”

Not long after this, Kerans takes a boat ride with base commander Colonel Riggs and a few of his men, looking down through the water at London streets: “Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.”

Then this line, observing the same sunken streetscape: “Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown with wild orchids.”

At the end of this ride, we get our first glimpse of Dr. Bodkins, Kerans’ elderly lab assistant: “Across the lagoon he could see the portly bare-chested figure of Dr. Bodkin on the starboard bridge of the testing station, the Paisley cummerbund around his waist and the green celluloid shade shielding his eyes making him look like a riverboat gambler on his morning off.”

Riggs and Keran then visit the fortified residence of Beatrice Dahl, an heiress who lounges in a preserved luxury unit of her own nearby. Riggs and Keran find her poolside in the penthouse: “Beatrice Dahl lay back on one of the deck-chairs, her long oiled body gleaming in the shadows like a sleeping python.”

I learned by watching interviews that surrealist painters were a big influence on Ballard, so Kerans lingers on a few pieces of modern art in Dahl’s penthouse that foreshadow the deep forces about to have their way with the cast: “On another wall one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.”

Then a bit of the view: “Now and then, in the glass curtain-walling of the surrounding buildings, they would see countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing faceted eyes of gigantic insects.”

Later, a scene in the floating laboratory shows the scientists’ creeping disinterest in their work, foreshadowing a much deeper break with what’s left of civilization: “They entered the cool darkness of the laboratory and sat down at their desks below the semicircle of fading programme schedules which reached to the ceiling behind the dais, looking down over the clutter of benches and fume cupboards like a dusty mural.”

Also from the lab: “Many of the cardboard screens had sprung off their drawing pins, and hung forwards into the air like the peeling hull-plates of a derelict ship, moored against its terminal pier and covered with gnomic and meaningless graffiti.”

Ballard then shows us the lagoon outside at midday: “Steeped in the vast heat, the lagoon lay motionlessly, palls of steam humped over the water like elephantine spectres.”

Without knowing why, Kerans later steals a compass from the storeroom of the floating military base: “Caging the compass, he rotated it towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness remained focused on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept ‘South’, with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outward from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.”

Another arresting sketch of the lagoon at night: Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber.

An officer in Riggs’ command vanishes just before the expedition is to return to Camp Byrd in Greenland. The following five quotes offer views from a search helicopter and the peak-heat search on foot: “Everywhere the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the fetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima.”

“He watched a succession of wavelets lapping at the sloping roof, wishing he could leave the Colonel and walk straight down into the water, dissolve himself and the ever present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds in the cool bower of its magical calm, in the luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea.”

“Kerans’ amusement at this notion was distracted by his discovery among the clutter of debris on the opposite bank of a small cemetery sloping down into the water, its leaning headstones advancing to their crowns like a party of bathers.”

“The yellow air of the noon high seemed to press down like a giant translucent counterpane on the leafy spread, a thousand motes of light spitting like diamonds whenever a bough moved and deflected the sun’s rays.”

“For nights afterward, in his dreams Kerans had seen Riggs dressed as William Tell, striding about in a huge Dalinian landscape, planting immense dripping sundials like daggers in the fused sand.”

Back at the base, Kerans is transfixed by what the fleeing soldier may have been running toward: “There he passed a quiet afternoon, nursing a light fever in his bunk, thinking of Hardman and his strange southward odyssey, and of the silt banks glowing like luminous gold in the meridian sun, both forbidding and inviting, like the lost but forever beckoning and unattainable shores of the amnionic paradise.”

Ballard repaints the lagoon, this time seen in Keran’s dreams: “Reflecting these intermittent flares, the deep bowl of the water shone in a diffused opalescent blur, the discharged light of myriads of phosphorescing animalicula, congregating in dense shoals like a succession of submerged haloes.”

Kerans awakes: "He woke in the suffocating metal box of his cabin, his head splitting like a burst marrow, too exhausted to open his eyes.”

Two dense and evocative turns of phrase plot Keran’s emerging response to the environment’s influence: “Timing them, he realized that the frequency was that of his own heartbeats, but in some insane way the sounds were magnified so that they remained just above the auditory threshold, reverberating dimly off the metal walls and ceiling like the whispering murmur of some blind pelagic current against the hull plates of a submarine.

“His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing on to his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths.”

Left to their own devices after they evade Riggs’ attempt to take them north, Kerans, Bodkins and Dahl each start to drift inward: “On the few occasions when Kerans called, she would be sitting on the patio or before a mirror in her bedroom, automatically applying endless layers of patina, like a blind painter forever retouching a portrait he can barely remember for fear that otherwise he will forget it completely.”

The villain, Strangman, arrives. Before things sour between him and the lagoon’s stay-behinds, Kerans, Bodkins, and Dahl visit his boat and witness his crew diving to explore a sunken planetarium: “Even the men swimming below the surface were transformed by the water, their bodies as they swerved and pivoted turned into gleaming chimeras, like exploding pulses of ideation in a neuronic jungle.”

In a fascinating scene, Kerans ends up donning a heavy diving suit in an attempt to appease Strangman during a tense moment. These two sentences are from his turn in the suit, walking through the sunken planetarium’s interior: “In front of him was the cabinet which had once held the instrument console, but the unit had been removed, and the producer’s swing-back seat faced out unobstructed like an insulated throne of some germ-obsessed potentate.

“Dimly illuminated by the small helmet lamp, the dark vault with its blurred walls cloaked with silt rose up above him like a huge velvet-upholstered womb in a surrealist nightmare.”

When things inevitably turn to open hostility, Kerans is subdued, bound to a mock throne, and left in the sun by Strangman and his men; Strangman asks “How do you do it?” when he finds the rapidly acclimating Kerans somehow alive on the second day under the sun’s “white carpet”: “It was this remark which sustained him through the second day, when the white carpet at noon lay over the square in incandescent layers a few inches apart, like the planes of parallel universes crystallized out of the continuum by the immense heat.”

Kerans hangs on to see another evening: “Overhead the sky was an immense funnel of sapphire and purple fantasticated whorls of coral cloud marking the descent of the sun like baroque vapor trails.”

Kerans escapes after being left for dead and finds a captive Dahl in Strangman’s quarters: “The chests at her feet were loaded with a mass of jewelled trash — diamanté anklets, gilt clasps, tiaras and chains of zircon, rhinestone necklaces and pendants, huge ear-rings of cultured pearl, overflowing from one chest to another and spilling onto the salvers placed on the floor like vessels to catch a quicksilver rainfall.”

Kerans breaks south at last, captive to the deep “archeo-psychic” pull of the reemergent jungle: “Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days.”

Kerans forges deeper south, finding the remains of a church at dusk: “Reaching the altar, he rested his arms on the chest-high marble, and watched the contracting disc of the sun, its surface stirring rhythmically like the slag on a bowl of molten metal.”

There you are; some of my favorite sentences and similes from J.G. Ballard’s debut novel, The Drowned World. Thank you for listening.

Resist!, Pavlov’s House and Battle Card: David Thompson Invades My Game Table

This is adapted from the script of Episode 101: Resist! First Play Caps off a Very David Thompson Summer”

I messaged board game designer David Thompson on BoardGameGeek this May when I was getting my teeth into Pavlov’s House, one of his many hit designs: “I kid you not,” I told him, “I bailed on a dinner party Saturday before the ‘dinner' part because I wanted to come home and run it again. Got an Order of the Red Banner, so I feel I made the right decision. Dinner is boring and Pavlov's House is awesome.”

I distinctly remember the decision point. I was in the kitchen of an acquaintance who was throwing himself an intimate going away party. There was an outgoing kid there who asked me if I liked to read. Something about the way I phrased my answer got him on a pep talk about the value of literacy. He told me that reading more is easier if you just start by reading a little bit every day.

Right about the time he suggested places to find used Stephen King books, a golden bolt shot all through me: “I gotta get the fuck outta here.” I was Starkville bound inside two minutes. I got home, set up the board again and ran it ’til I dropped.

A lot of Thompson’s work crept onto my table without my planning it that way. You know how you become aware of a movie director or record producer in hindsight because you keep seeing the same name in the credits of your favorite stuff? It’s like that.

This is the story about how this house became a David Thompson house in 2025, in the context of a handful of titles: Resist!, Pavlov’s House and Battle Card.

Resist! First Impressions: Looks pretty now, wait until you have to start burning your fighters to get stuff done, you’re gonna cry

I was obsessed with Resist! from the moment I read about it on Space-Biff’s blog when Salt & Pepper Games debuted it about three years ago. In 2022 I was making friends with the fact that I’d be playing more games without friends if I wanted to stop being bitter and find a new way to access the beauty of a game spread out on a table. Resist! looked like a beautiful way to do that.

Between his work with the Valiant Defense series and solo designs for Salt & Pepper Games, it seems like Thompson likes a good underdog story to give gameplay extra juice. Here he — along with co-designers Trevor Benjamin and Roger Tankersley — gave solo players a chance to reignite a chapter of the fierce and doomed attempts to undo General Francisco Franco’s 1930s military coup in Spain, which set off a three-year civil war. 

This subject matter ignited thrilling neural pathways: strains of The Clash’s “Spanish Bombs,” memories of a book I read about the making of Picasso’s Guernica, scenes from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

Resist! is set during a war, but like 2015’s The Grizzled, isn’t centered on the mechanics of shoot, move, maneuver. Resist! abstracts all that and instead sets you before a poignant series of keenly dangerous roster management and target selection puzzles, whose actors and targets are rendered in the dusky mauves and rusts of Spanish illustrator Albert Monteys’ pens and inks. On top of all the other rich associations, it looks like I also have the opportunity to dive into the frame of a Tintin adventure.

My fighters are Spanish maquis who fled to southern France during the civil war, acquired sabotage and guerrilla warfare skills during the German occupation, then snuck back into Spain to fuck with General Franco’s tradfash regime even after his military officially won the civil war.

I carried a lot with me to my first play. Resist! hit my mailbox right at the end of a vicious three-day sick that stole one of September’s sweetest golden weeks from me. I was emotionally grated. My whole self was a raw nerve when I got this to the table: What the hell was I doing, trying to take comfort in playpen resistance in a rural memory of a town just a few miles south of the Ludlow, where the resistors met the guns of the Colorado militia and the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and got shot at and burned up without one demand being met? My skin ached. My heart was brittle and angry.

But I kept on because I still wanted into this story and its system. I’ve noticed that, within the mechanical loop of what you’re asked to do on a turn, a different world — similar to and evocative of its real-life source but imbued with its own sustaining, hermetic inertia — emerges alongside and within the formal confines of game. Playing with yourself is not resistance. But it can provide moments of transcendence. It created a space where I could work with my little cartoon guerrilla fighters.

I still felt like bawling when I had to sacrifice Ricardo on the first mission. If there’s one mechanic that not only provides the most emotion and challenge — juxtaposing the game’s world and its tantalizing offer of organized resistance against the creeping takeover of the AI-Silicon Valley-Pentagon panopticon — it’s the dilemma at the heart of it: You’re commanding guerrillas who must strike and melt away if they don’t want to get hunted down. Or get half the people in the village where they get supplies lined up and shot. 

The operatives at your disposal are Sagrario, Ricardo, Anastasio, Manuel and 20 others, each of which have a two-sided card. One shows what they can get done while preserving their cover. The other side of their card is much more powerful, but Franco’s spies and security forces are going to know who they are if you use that ability.

Turn one, it looked like I'd be able to blow up the target bridge, but Ricardo — one of the four sent out for the job — was gonna get his fingernails torn out by the secret police or something. How many maquis prayed while huddling in some mountain cave that a blown operative was lucky enough to get shot in action rather than finish their time tied to a chair somewhere, coughing up teeth and secrets?

Resist! Era 1 Mission: I thought I was pretty badass when I was tearing through these assignments, then I realized I’d burned too many fighters while flexing over the rubble of my early-game accomplishments

The game strategy that tips this seesaw of consequences is more subtle than I just suggested. Your maquis cards do more than sneak, snip, wire, bomb and ambush: Some of their effects help bring new members into the group, ferret out spies, boost other cards, and deliver intel on target locales.

There’s more than one kind of tradeoff to weigh, especially when you consider there are up to four missions in play at once, each of which has its own garrison of enemy cards on the lookout for your fuckery: Engineers, grunts, spymasters, and soldiers are on high alert at each barracks or bridge you want to attack — and each unit type triggers effects that either make your attack more risky or result in bloody reprisal on your operatives and local civilians if you don’t have enough firepower to take Franco’s spies and soldiers down. The first time I saw how much there was to think about on a mission, I just froze.

But it was my first play, so I freed myself of calculating all the angles for the initial raids and focused on the steps of the turns, which were velvety smooth because the rulebook is excellent. I stormed a series of level one missions in high style, launching big raids that wiped out the garrisons and smashed the targets. 

Which was a tremendous lark until the harder missions started rolling out and I realized I’d lost too many maquis, there were more spies diluting my roster, and I was in deep trouble. Antonio, Manuel, Manuela, Juana, Anastasio, Sagrario, Soledad and Marcelino had already been captured, killed or gone to ground somewhere.

My last turn of the night consisted only of drumming the table with my fingers, exhaling loudly through my nose, staring back and forth between my hand and the missions, looking for some magical seam through the midgame that wasn’t there. I only had three maquis at my disposal. I’d scouted two locations and the garrisons guarding each were pure murder. I was already looking at the end.

The end here can come a few different ways: If you fail two missions, get too many civilians killed, or your talent pool gets so infested with spies that you draw a whole handful of them, you trigger an immediate loss. 

The win? That’s kind of up to you. 

You can decide to deactivate your maquis and close out the resistance at the end of any turn if you decide your cadre of guerrillas is too diminished to continue without being wiped out altogether. Almost any solid effort will win you a forgiving Draw in the end-of-game win rating system, but the outcomes grade up from there all the way to the Epic Win, an ahistorical trophy where you actually succeed in toppling Franco.

A Draw is what I had to settle for my first time out. After a dinner break, I looked at the midgame situation again, took down one more target for pride, then had my plucky cartoon squad hang it up.

From a gameplay standpoint, I want more of this. The lucid setup diagram and game steps glide you right up that first few yards of trail, giving you just enough of a taste of action to want to scale up the well-guarded heights of the much meaner midgame. I want to explore the subtleties and power of the card effects, plus I’ve learned enough about the bastards who guard the targets to crave a second run at them. My read on this game since its release feels 100% dead on. This will get played more and reported on in the future.

Reflecting on my first game, I linger on the ache of something else fragile, beautiful, and necessary that Resist! serves up at the tender junction of the imaginative and the historical: The power of hidden places. The ability to melt away from the sweeping gaze of men who crave omniscience, both for themselves and to sell to the government. These kinds of spaces, even when they’re in the hands of a Bond villain on an island in a movie, have always intrigued me. They’re psychic, mythological and ecological counterweights, quasi-political wildnernesses of liberty and privacy that can never be wholly tamed, patrolled or surveilled.

No fascist dictator can gain or hold their position without the backing of the industrialists and financiers. Today is no different, except for the prominence and loudness of the digital-era moguls in that cohort — men whose businesses’ share price hinges on knowing everything while making nothing we really couldn’t do without if it were gone tomorrow. To hear them talk, the permanent closure of hidden space is not only something to be celebrated, it’s a fait accompli.

For them I reserve my favorite gypsy curse from the pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls: “I shit in the milk of the whores that birthed you.”

Pavlov’s House Replays: I like this game every bit as much as I did in May, but I wasn’t nearly as good as I imagined

Now let’s rewind to this spring and a different set of David Thompson underdogs: the soldiers of Pavlov’s House, named after the Russian sergeant who got handed the order to grab and keep an apartment building overlooking 9 January Square during the worst of the Stalingrad fighting in 1942.

Remember back at the beginning of the segment where I bragged to designer David Thompson about winning an Order of the Red Banner — a highly rated win — during my first series of games? I’m not so sure I did.

Or if I did, I sure can’t seem to recreate it after having it back on the table for three weeks in September. Does Pavlov’s House have replay value? Yes. Especially if you value humility.

Quick recap for those who missed Episode 91: Pavlov’s House is part of Dan Verssen Games’ Valiant Defense series — games where you step into pockets of WWII history when American, Russian, Polish and other nations’ fighters mounted legendary stands against vastly superior German forces.

Before I had to pack it up to work with Resist!, I was running a game every day or two for three weeks. It was my morning workout, my mental sparring partner, the whole time. And it punished me for my rusty skills.

The first gains in spring were the easiest, but I plateaued when I got it back out, losing my first four games as Stugs and Panzers barreled right through the walls. How could this be? In my May string of games, I was getting pretty good at one of the game’s most addictive features: Connecting decisions on the regimental part of the map with the tactical situation in the house. Keeping anti-aircraft cover up so you can string up those comms lines, keep your artillery support working, and get supplies, fresh legs, and combat engineers to spell the wounded and killed inside that death trap.

Except I kept getting overrun. What the hell happened?

One, my expectations were off. I anticipated the same rate of improvement I felt during the first few games, which any athlete or coach will tell you is an utter fantasy. Two, I had a few minor rules wrong. Three, I remembered a couple of my favorite tricks, but forgot all the subtle secondary decisions that made those gambits work at the streetfight level. There were also obvious strategies I’d never even considered.

The battle doctrine I adopted for Pavlov’s House was a lot like me: Too clever by half, vulnerable to disruption and prone to frequent meltdown. The surges of bad luck you experience in this game are frightful and require the long view if you’re going to avoid what I did one morning two weeks ago: I screamed “ROLL SOMETHING ELSE!” and hurled a German Stuka attack card across the living room.

I’d set it up right, placing an artillery spotter in the House to help blunt the late-game German onslaught. Everybody in that house was screaming at the spotter to call it in the thunder because there was a clanking tide of Panzers and machine gun teams bearing down on the west side of the house…and there was nobody on the other end of the radio because the Stukas pinpoint drilled my one working artillery site for the second turn a row. Plus my ack-ack bozos didn’t hit anything in the early game. Again. 

These kinds of reversals are amusing, even cinematic, when you’re learning and infuriating when you’re done being amazed by theme and want to start mastering the system. You will simply not enjoy this unless you’re well conditioned to hosing your pals off the walls, taking a deep breath, and stoically doing the best you can with what’s left.

Don’t be mistaken: This game is my #1 solo addiction of the summer because of its dance of ups and downs — and for the variety of decisions it affords you with its balance of quick pace and manageable detail. Last summer it was Cascadia. Summer 2025 belonged to Pavlov’s House. When I’m willing to eat breakfast standing over the stove for the 10th straight time because I don’t want to take the game down…that’s your toast and your jam.

I’m still looking for that surge of simultaneous luck, agility, and tinkered approach that will vault one of my squads into the halls of wartime myth. Because after I do that, there are advanced variants I haven’t even touched and want to try, bad breaks and crashouts and all.

Battle Card Operation Brevity: You guys are so dead when I get to Ft. Capuzzo

Last week I picked up my Battle Card maps again and moved on to Operation Brevity, one of the Commonwealth’s pushes against the Axis early in the North African campaign.

Your job, general? Roll out of the desert in three major assault columns and start kicking overstretched Axis forces out of places like Halfaya Pass, Musaid, Fort Capuzzo and other key areas where British high command has figured the Italians or Germans will move if you give ‘em a good, hard shove.

In the real-life version of this campaign, this limited offensive was also supposed to set up a possible drive on the city of Tobruk, where Commonwealth forces were surrounded and still holding out, but Battle Card doesn’t ask the world of you: This is the first scenario I’ve tried in the series that gives you ranked victories or losses based on which locations you take, and at what cost.

There’s not a lot of head-scratching required to execute the plan: You attack and gun it through everything in your path…until your three major columns are abreast in Sollum, Musaid, Ft. Capuzzo or Hafid Ridge. Put it in neutral and have a look at that map, sir: Depending on how many men and tanks you lost getting there, Axis forces at Sidi Azeiz could bog you down in counterrattacks.

This is the thinkiest of the three I’ve played so far because of how the roads between objectives start to intersect and how limited time makes you weigh whether or not you can go for the Major Victory, a Minor Victory, or even take an L if one of the prongs on your offensive pitchfork break.

To put things in perspective: If you’re looking for a stiff challenge, see Resist! or Pavlov’s House. Most of these maps you can figure out how to crush in a few tries unless you are in some kind of vegetative state. But I ran Operation Brevity an extra four or five games because there seemed to be more wiggle in how your final push takes form in turns two, three and four.

While the challenge level remains easy, the variations from map to map are thoughtful and entertaining. I’ve still got Operation Eidelweiss and The Battle of Moro River to check out. Count on hearing about those in the future, because if nothing else, I’ll need to return to these in between games of Resist! so I can feel like a big, tough man from time to time.

Considering how few games I play every year in comparison to most board game podcasters and avid players, it’s impressive that David Thompson designs managed to command such a large space at the table. It was timing, subject and luck — like I said at the outset, I didn’t even notice it had happened until this year. 

But now that it’s happened, I can understand how Thompson’s peculiar approach to weight, theme, and ways to tactically abstract both the leviathan of era and the immediacy of action lends itself well to me — a guy with a climbing interest in historical games, but who is hesitant to tackle the genre’s new and classic heavyweights.

I’m starting to think that my current reigning #1, Thunderbolt Apache Leader, might be the upper ceiling of what I can learn and play on my own. Thompson’s designs are well within that band, and I’m happy there’s so much to discover here, so much room to run. So many excellent new reasons to see a text from a friend talking about something going on in town and say to myself, “Pffft! Fuck that!” I have new tactics and the world’s evils to consider. 

Breakup Gaming Society Hits 100: Official Press Release

CONTACT
Nate Warren
chief.rocka@breakupgamingsociety.com

Indie Board Game Podcast Notches 100th Episode of Autobiographical Tabletop Play With a Side of Booze and Golden Era Hip Hop Curation

Breakup Gaming Society — Top Podcast in Starkville, Colorado — Delights Key Audiences: Old People Who Still Know Words and ASMR Babies Who Like Sounds That Last a Long Time

STARKVILLE, Colo. — Sept. 22, 2025 — Solo podcast Breakup Gaming Society marked its 100th episode in September. Festivities included the host feeling good about himself for about six hours, then beginning work on Episode 101.

"I wanted this week to be big, so I rented one of those inflatable dancing things and put it outside my house, but that took all the marketing budget for the 100th episode push," said podcast writer, host and producer Nate Warren. "Then it got attacked by dogs and now it’s just the base fan unit blasting a single tatter of neon green vinyl straight up into the air. But I’ve got the unit for three more days, so it's staying on."

Breakup Gaming Society's 100th Episode features:

• Second tasting of West Bottoms Whiskey Co.'s Kansas City Whiskey

• Review of Pyrotechnics from The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, a two-player indie card game about fireworks

• Interview with tabletop roleplaying game editor and blogger Walton Wood (Līber Lūdōrum, Bogfolk) about Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel, two near-future dystopian TTRPGs

• Selections from and review of “3 Ft. Deep” by DJ Format & Abdominal

• Several instances of psychological decay framed as insight and transformation

Keep up with Breakup Gaming Society on Bluesky, Instagram and LinkedIn.

About Breakup Gaming Society

Breakup Gaming Society is a twice-monthly solo indie podcast that explores board games, booze and hip hop with an autobiographical, comedic and melancholic bent. It is written, produced and hosted by Nate Warren in Starkville, Colorado.

Dwelling Solo RPG Session 4: One Plate of Sugar After Another

This is the Kitchen scene generated from the prompts on pages 34-35 of Dwelling, a solo journaling RPG about facing spirits and memories in a haunted house. Listen to what happened in the previous room here.

KITCHEN

The Recall and Mark prompts here offer us a respite of sorts after the narrator is drawn into the kitchen on the tail of the Dining Room’s feast of rage. From the prompt on page 34: “In the kitchen I’m met with a hazy glow of residual heat, a welcome feeling breaking the chill that has set over the house. The tension of my body fades as I feel the warmth settle into my skin, moving deep into my bones.”

The buttermilk pancakes were inexhaustible.

My hoggery passed without comment while her mom kept piling them up. Those pancakes were the most she’d ever said to me. I felt accepted. I heard later that she would privately lobby AB to stick with me because I was in college. It felt one more way to bind AB to me and it helped me believe the college brochure stories about myself. I ate it up.

That light could only have been a Saturday morning, 10:37ish, my acme in both time of day and course of life, when an appetite and half-decent manners were all you needed to belong.

Her mom had moved to Texas after AB and her sister got out of high school, but she kept up the big house in Denver as some sort of dormitory for her girls until she could marry them off. Why not the shy boy, half of whose body weight was head and eyes? I think I was being fattened up for nuptials. Until love arrives, bet on calories.

AB took her one plate quietly in small bites. You never saw stuff on her lips or in her mouth when she laughed while countering key details of her sister’s family stories. It’s hard to even picture her eating when all I could hear was the wet chug of my own jaws. The tangy pancakes and syrup reverted to paste that glutted every receptor. I had pancakes and I went blind: No sensation except the sugar lift, the fluff and goo, a second plate, a full glass of whole milk and sausage patties besides.

I accepted her mom’s oblique offerings until I was immobilized. AB and I smoked the same brand back then. After the feed we shared one in the minimal privacy of the backyard of their big girls’ dorm in their subdivision, every young tree in sight staked and guyed. It must have been spring. I fell asleep on one of those folding chaises with the aluminum frames and saggy tube-strip cushioning.

When else do you get to do that, wake up with batter-and-cigarette mouth and find her downstairs and get as much as you want, as often as you can crave it? Our repertoire was mostly kissing and touching at length. We were quiet lovers even when nobody else was around, her candied chatter tapering off while I took time with her neck and earlobes, her arms raising easily when I lifted her sweatshirt away. Just one plate of sugar after another.

She called me Pancake Master for months after that and her little sister joined in. I stewed when I heard it, not because the nickname had bad intent, but because it wasn’t clever enough and I was already deadly fascinated by the girls in the bars on Capitol Hill who got bad haircuts on purpose and laughed at girls who dressed like AB.

Mark

Something like a grain of rice presses into the bottom of my foot on the kitchen floor. This hated ping from the sole of my foot disarticulates the smell. I dig it off in the dark, trying to guess if it is a rock or cereal, feeling violated.

I cook breakfast in this home occasionally, but I am no more comfortable wielding J’s chef-grade pans than I would be in his old pants. I have some of the ingredients and none of the touch. But those wouldn’t be enough, either. I don’t have the infrastructure: The bower of Saturdays and people who would just appear in them, or me in theirs, while I was mistaken for sweet and bankable.

Now lost touch shunts to dumb food eaten out of plastic clamshell trays in front of a computer; heft without satisfaction. “Feed the boy!” It happened so often and so easy I mistook it for the world’s natural reflex. “Give unto him rice and burritos, soda and tender thighs!” Now this is only the takeout cashier’s purview. I dress to hide the results. I don’t look good anymore when I tuck my shirt in. Fortunately untucked button-ups, flip flops and jeans are an acceptable uniform now, but I can’t hide in it for much longer at this rate.

Some nights I can claw back gristle from that banquet, if I show up at the right bar drunk enough to forget myself and catch them drunk enough on the night their fuckup boyfriend has the kids. Some rotten futon or another in building GG of a lamplit complex too grim to behold in morning. It invariably feels like work, even more work than breakfast in this kitchen and just about as satisfying. The chief thrill is getting back to J’s house knowing you somehow got to her place last night without somebody getting a DUI.

The thing I picked off my foot feels more like a rod than a disc; it crumbles after I roll it around with enough force. I dust the particles off on the right leg of my sweats. What was it, that old “MacArthur Park” chestnut…I’ll never make a pancake like that again?

Next: The Foyer

Pyrotechnics: The Pretty Little Card Game That Goes Boom

This is adapted from the script of Episode 100: “Pyrotechnics Review, Playing With Dystopia, Surrendering Secret Wars”

One of the principles that has crystallized for me after 100 episodes is to be ruthless about external dependencies. If you really want to do X, but you’ve made X dependent on Y, which is a person or event or piece of software or some other nuisance, I make it my job to reimagine X without Y and get the lessened version of X done at all costs. Or scotch it and move to Z. 

This triage can help train someone out of that kind of thinking where personal projects get as far-flung and fragile as pre-COVID supply chains. I’ve actually come to believe that these Byzantine webs of dependencies masquerading as plans are actually a way of saying, “I’m scared to try,” because there’s always something too expensive or somebody who won’t call you back. You always have to be on guard against the recreant and daydreamer in your head. (“Recreant.” There’s your vocab word of the day. Look it up, coward.)

Pyrotechnics: Be the first to empty your hand by setting off five firework patterns before your opponent does

I got stuck briefly in one of those pouty throw-up-your-hands fits when I was excited to try out my copy of Pyrotechnics, one of the pile of indie games I previewed for you two episodes ago. But the schedule sagged because it’s a two-player game and I put it off because I didn’t want another repeat of my last two boring multiplayer sits.

I was slipping sideways into that same old trap: “I can get this written up IF I can line up X and Y and IF they like it enough to figure out what makes it work and IF they don’t take 45 minutes of breaks in a 20-minute game or quit the game early to show me some bullshit on their phone…”

So I awoke three days before Episode 100 was due and realized I could just ad lib my own crude bot opponent for my first series of this card-shedding, hand management, and action selection morsel. You’re trying to be the first to research, discover and set off five kinds of fireworks before your opponent can. The goal is to be the first player with an empty hand by using card effects and smartly managing the game’s micro-economy of tokens, called Sparks.

My bot’s name is Farto the Lakeside Festival Arsonist, who is patented and highly trained on three decades of articles from every newspaper in Indiana from 1896-1916, but you can’t use Farto without subscribing to my service. Again, check the intro and outro audio of Episode 100 to learn about my new giveaway, which could also include a free enterprise subscription to Farto that comes with up to 50 seats. That’s 50 motherfuckers you can lay off right now. 

As far as proof of concept goes, I used Farto’s proprietary capabilities to help me simulate enough of the game so I could see how the three actions and the card mechanics delivered on the box’s promise of a short, but chewy, 10-minute contest.

I know Twilight Flare isn’t all that popular because of the little unpleasantness from last year, but I have jiggered the mix and the burn and now it’s designed to cause 30% fewer injuries

In a game of Pyrotechnics you each start with five cards in your hand and a supply of five cards in the middle, each depicting a kind of firework display. There are three actions — Research, Discover and Display — on each card with icons telling you how to resolve the effect you want to trigger.

The first step on your turn is always Research, which has to be done with one of the cards from your hand. On the second step, you can Discover or Display using one of the face-up cards in the common market. Discover lets you gain or manipulate more Sparks and Display lets you use those Sparks to make the sky go boom and get that card out of your hand.

Spark tokens come in six colors that move to the supply, your pile, or your opponent’s pile depending on which of the three game actions you take. Putting on a successful Display means paying some amount of Sparks, either in common red-yellow-blue Primary Sparks or rarer purple-green-orange Sparks, which require intervening exchange moves to get your hands on.

The movement of Sparks and cards create two poles of interesting tension: You’re always forced to put the card you used for Research face up into the market, so think about what kind of actions you’ve just made available to your opponent. You’ve also got to make very efficient Spark acquisition moves in the game’s little microeconomy. 

I was grinding my gears a bit and even poor Farto was totally out to sea. After my first few games, I did acquire a starter-kit repertoire of a few no-nonsense opener moves. Farto’s job was mostly taking random actions based on a die roll.

One of the rules Farto lived by was that it always set off a Display if it had the Sparks in hand to do one. Little MFer actually beat me the first game, but soon after that I was intervening in Farto’s base programming, optimizing some of its trade actions so it wasn’t out-and-out wasting turns.

Because the experience is so recent, I can’t help but compare it to another short-player I reviewed last episode — Battle Card from Postmark Games — because these games both offer almost comically compact playtimes.

Battle Card’s strong suit is the beauty of its maps and the junctures on them where chance and daring mesh with the actual historical battle you’re playing. These games run about the same playing time, but I felt I there was…just magically somehow more game in Pyrotechnics just because of the how it felt when my brain started to run increasingly high-stakes figure-eight patterns of decisions around the card drafting and Spark management poles.

I think it’s the tightness of the play in Pyrotechnics’s three acts and the way the Spark supply and actions take on distinct dimensions in such a short time: An opening series of more forgiving moves where you simply bring some Sparks in to get started, a middle rush of displays being put out, and a tight end run of agonizing turns where you’re trying to dump that last card before Farto does. In this instance I refer to your friend Farto from college, not my advanced AI. The headspace Pyrotechnics occupies is all out of proportion with the time elapsed. I found it both brisk and pleasantly displacing.

I would love to session this over a beer or two with a friend; this feels like a gem that formed in carefully tended mathematical rock. Of course, an opponent will bring to the fore potential that Farto couldn’t: Nasty Spark theft at the right time, resource denial plays, and those “bluffs and feints” that the box copy talks about, although I’m not yet seeing that at my current level of experience.

But I want that experience to grow with this tightly orchestrated display of pops, crumps and bursts on the game table. This was a buoyant and stimulating break from what I’ve been playing lately, and I can’t imagine two hobbyists or casuals who wouldn’t delight in knocking down five or six matches over lunch.

Right now the game is still in prototype phase, fuse burning down to the last inch or two. You can stay updated on when the finished box is ready at The Seahorse and The Hummingbird website or head to Midnight Market on Nov. 7, a virtual three-day indie game market hosted by LunarPunk Games, at which Pyrotechnics will be available.

Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel TTRPGs: Walt Shows Us Two Challenging Itch.io Refugees

In the wake of the stir created by Itch.io’s mass purging of darkly themed TTRPGs in the face of pressure from payment processors and others, we talk with Walt (Līber Lūdōrum, Bogfolk) about two wild creations in that exodus: Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel by Sandro AD.

As related to me, Alessandro AD pulled these games from Itch.io at first news of the culling; they survive for now on a Google Drive, where they are free to download and play.

What are we in for here? Walt outlines these bleak near-future systems where economic exploitation manifests in debt, desperation, sex and violence. [FAIR WARNING: Heavy themes all around. In addition, The F slur appears in this audio as part of a quote from Digital Angel’s description copy.]

West Bottoms Kansas City Whiskey: Authentic Enjoyment in Inauthentic Times

This is adapted from the script of Episode 99, Battle Card Review + Meet The Lads of “War With a Mate”

I was slugging some Michelob Ultra in the evening and wanted something else to complement the thrill of pushing the Germans out of Eindhoven and remembered I had a bottle of West Bottoms Whiskey Company’s Kansas City Whiskey in the cabinet.

My old college bro Baetz dropped it off during the Colorado leg of a road trip that took him from California to Missouri and back. Dude blasted an extra three hours off his planned route to show up with a bottle, some ribs to throw on the grill, and a hose.

Well, he didn’t bring the hose. He picked that up for me after he sold me on the idea of showering outside whenever possible. “Fuck cleaning a shower and fuck paying for water that only goes down the drain” was his general pitch. He lives in a respectable residential area in the Bay Area, but he built himself a privacy screen on his back deck and showers out there because he doesn’t give a shit and he’s still got that Missouri in him.

Why hadn’t this occurred to me as I explored the many liberating country bachelor life hacks I’ve acquired since 2020? Why couldn’t I have seized the glory of this fantastic redneck hygiene practice? I tried it out the day after he left and I haven’t showered inside once since then. Nor have I had a proper sit with the bottle.

West Bottoms up: Inconclusive early taste with the bearer of the whiskey.

At 94 proof, the first sip was a wallop, delivering a steady burn and not much else from snout to tail. I liked it. After weeks of just Michelob Ultra to keep from being simply unspooled by the heat, I was ready for a drink that said something, even if it was an airhorn to the face. 

Second sip: The burn started to show me the friends it brought along, including the more urbane bite of the rye peeking out. That’s what’s promised on the bottle, along with “notes of Olarosa Sherry.” I’m not sure if that’s what gave it that minor band of sweetness I got on the third sip or not. 

The bottle additionally sold itself as a “pre-Prohibition Kansas City whiskey,” which struck a suspicious note. I’ve noted that when craft distilleries can’t list a real moustachioed Kentucky bourbon don in their pedigree, they always make this play: Tease the ideal customer with amber scenes of dudes hammering the keys at juke joints and sunsets on massive cattle pens and sparks flying off train brakes so they feel like real American men in a tasteful and obliquely patriotic way.

A lot of “Inspired by” talk. It’s ingratiating. I don’t need that. What’s going on in my little shooter is enough. This is an interesting recipe. The flavors are banded and muscular and don’t try too hard to disappear into each other. 

MORNING-AFTER NOTE: This drink is actually made in Kansas City. In a tunnel right in the heart of the storied commercial district they’re talking about. What did I expect them to do, in all fairness? Brand it as the drink of Arctic explorers or Bedouin traders or curling teams? What got into me when I wrote this riff about their completely common-sense brand? Cynicism. Fatigue at seeing everything that connects any two actions in time a “journey.” The “hero story” bullshit and pat transformation stories that plague my LinkedIn feed. Pastel animation selling usurious consumer financing. The collapsing of historical perspective in the wind tunnel of digital memory, leaving a shrinking shorthand of vaguely nostalgic images or reels that increasingly point at mysterious and forgotten tundras. Burgeoning sewers of calculated, synthetic marketing communication everywhere, moving format to format like a starved beast as it devours one medium after another in its mimicry. None of that is the drink’s fault. I like the drink. I also saved some of the bottle so I could see how it behaves in a mixed drink of some kind. Keep an eye out for that.

I got other effects at the tail end that were interesting and subtle, but there’s no use paying attention to them because a) I’m a dabbler whose written vocabulary far outstrips his sensory discernment b) I was still impressed by the alcohol content and how loud that rye flavor clapped its cymbals in my face. This drink felt like real decisions were made.

Also my sinuses stopped up like cement after the third taste. Maybe I’m allergic to the real legacy of Midwestern turn-of-the-century America. There went my dreams of sliding a straight razor in the pocket of my overalls and…getting a DUI two blocks from my house in my vintage Wagoneer with the real wood paneling, sobbing in the backseat behind the plexiglass of the cruiser as I watch a team in a cherry picker rig swap out a 30’ high Cracker Barrel sign back to the old logo in a nearby parking lot and the officer calls in the tow, telling me that I seem like a good guy and it’s a real shame.

This drink succeeds despite my gripes about the world I saw in the label. Its true package was the surprise of its arrival and transfer: A V6 Sable hitting my driveway at dusk and a real no-bullshit flavor gifted to me by a no-bullshit kind of dude.

Thanks for coming through and being a real one, Baetz.

Battle Card from Postmark Games: Six Tidy and Clever WW2 Battles

This is adapted from the script of Episode 99, Battle Card Review + Meet The Lads of “War With a Mate”

When the Imperial Japanese Army hit Malaya, British Commonwealth forces — including Indian and Malayan troops — got rolled up like a taco. The Allies blew up something like 100 bridges as they fled south and the Japanese still ran them down in just over two months.

So here I sit in front of the first of six campaigns of Battle Card, a collection of WWII print-and-play titles from Postmark Games. It takes about five minutes of setup to see where the design logic and the historical situation come together on my little map, upon which sit a bunch of six-sided dice that portray the strength and position of the forces: a string of two-strength Allied units against two max-strength Japanese units. 

One sheet of rules and dice that you supply get you off and running (for your life) in The Malayan Campaign, one of six WW2 “battles in a bottle” that come with Postmark Games’ Battle Card print-and-play solo game.

Looking from the Allied seat, you’re supposed to craft a successful fighting retreat — one that comes out better on your table than it did for the Brits and their cohort in real life —  by rolling back down two main roads and combining strength until you find the right space to gamble on making a stand. 

You want accessible? I picked up the rules in earnest for the first time last Sunday morning and logged 20 games before the day was over. Including an 11-game test because I thought I’d found an exploit where you could easily win at far north of 50%. I was wrong. I barely won the 11th-game tiebreaker.

I think it was fitting that the only colored d6s I had to use for the Japanese units were massive red novelty craps dice, because it really brought home the feeling of a massive and implacable opponent bearing down on your house of toothpicks.

You’ll soon be hauling ass down one of the two Malayan roads where the pursuing Japanese always catch up with you, forcing you into binary defend-or-counterrattack rolls. 

There’s just two ways to succeed: Get one of your seven die down the road to Singapore while it’s at three strength or better, or destroy one of the two six-strength Japanese forces. None of your dice have more than two value except for one; it’s designed to be a running beatdown where you have a couple of windows to win.

The Allies have another consideration: Halfway down one of the two roads in a place called Endau. If you get booted out of there, you lose regardless. For a brief time you’ve got air cover that lets you bomb one of the IJA’s dice and reduce it by one, but I can’t envision any way you can hold it longer than a turn, so that air support has to be in the right place.

It reminds me of the fight scenes from 1974’s Chinatown. There’s no seesaw battle where one guy has some stage blood trickling from one corner of his mouth after 15 seconds of boxing. It’s a broken nose, it’s a knee to the crotch, and it’s over. Sometimes I couldn’t believe how short the games were. The Allies also forfeit if you run out of turns, but I don’t think I ever had one go past four.

On my last try of the night, I abandoned my 50/50 success rate strategy of squaring off with the Japanese at Kampar on the Trunk Road and tried the “haul ass to Singapore” gambit instead, winning narrowly on my first try.

Experienced wargamers may find this a passing novelty, but this is a quick-punchout puzzle that could serve as a great entry point for the kind of person who thought they’d never pick up a wargame. 

Students of the era will appreciate touches like seeing the Australian and Indonesian outfits IDed on the map; people who just want a lighting-round puzzle will get it, because it’s over in sometimes two or three moves if you don’t. The Malayan Campaign feels like it can easily serve either kind of player.

The next day I moved on to the second of the six maps: Market Garden, depicting the massive Allied airdrop into Holland that didn’t quite go well. Can I make it come out better? Yes. Unless I got a rule wrong, I had the smoothest command debut in the history of warfare. I rolled the American 30 Corps from Eindhoven to the critical bridge at Arnhem in a silky five turns.

Battle Card Market Garden scenario: Get outta the way losers, 30 Corps’ coming through

Sometimes these matches feel so slight that they evade coming into being, but these are billed as microgames after all.

This one has a variable setup, because the Allied forces at each of the four towns along the route were airdropped in, so the first step is finding out just how many men you have after the chaos of their parachute rides. These units have to get control of their drop sites so the 30 Corps can roll on through. Hold a town long enough for them to get there? The Germans get crushed when 30 Corps shows up. 

But there’s a ticking clock and no room for snags. If you haven’t seized the bridge at Arnhem in six or fewer turns OR you lose any of your airborne elements in combat, it’s lights out, you’ve lost the initiative and the ability to control the route. The German dice start out weak but gradually reinforce if you don’t keep a foot on their neck.

This is spiced up by the fact that outside of the 30 Corps rolling through town, there’s pretty much zero help coming for the 101st in Einhoven, the 82nd in Grave or the 1st Airborne in Arnhem. Each have to attack enough to generate a table result that flips their assigned town to U.S. control. The 30 Corps can’t get in otherwise. 

There’s one opportunity for the First Airborne over at the Arnhem bridgehead to reinforce, but other than that, none of the German garrisons you attack in any of the four towns can be totally removed by your airdropped forces. Each turn, the German die regrow a HP, reminding you to keep this thing moving at all costs.

There’s also an interesting wrinkle in the town of Nijmegen — the last stop on the road before the climactic bridge. You have no forces there. If the 30 Corps stalls on the road because the advance forces couldn’t control a town, it looks like you’ll have to waste a precious turn shifting your other airborne forces down the road to hit Nijmegen while the 30 Corps sits in their own exhaust fumes wondering what the hell the holdup is.

This didn’t happen to me my first two tries because my setup rolls and repeated attacking favored me, so I’m curious to see what happens the day my early luck runs out and I have to sweat out a time-costly move to secure Nijmegen while the clock ticks.

I’ve got four more Battle Card scenarios in the wings waiting to be tried: Operation Brevity, The Battle of Moro River, Operation Eidelweiss, and The Battle of Mortain, all of which promise to throw more curves and puzzles that are thoughtfully meshed with the inflection points of the actual battles. I’ll be adding those playthroughs on the blog throughout the fall.

Here’s my read on this series so far: This is an elegant and approachable path to a historical game that works just as well for somebody who doesn’t care about wargames but who will be lured in by the promise of a well-designed map, some dice, and a story-based spatial puzzle with some luck built in to evoke the abstracted battlefield. I could feel the trumpet of relief pierce the fog in the Dutch countryside every time I got to push my plain white die, representing 30 Corps, one town closer to the objective and remove a German die from the map. It felt more satisfying than it had a right to.

In terms of making high-value eye candy with jump-in-and-drive rulesets, Postmark Games seem like they have it totally dialed in. And speaking of design, I need to circle back and correct an omission in my Episode 98 preview: Postmark Games consists of Matthew Dunston and Rory Muldoon, who bring years of game and visual design expertise to bear on these affordable diversions. In addition, Nils Johansson gets graphic designer and co-game designer billing for the Battle Card series along with David Thompson. Strong work, gents.

Next episode the Fall Indie Game Haul continues with play notes and impressions on what’s in this little Pyrotechnics box from The Seahorse and the Hummingbird team.

Vijayanagara: Deeper and More Informed Praise for This Game

This is adapted from the script of Episode 98, “ˆLight and Get Away, It’s the Fall Small Games Preview.”

I’m taking you back to medieval India for deeper thoughts on my initial take on Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India 1290-1398 from GMT Games. Outside of obsessive Faraway play on BoardGameGeek, this is my heartthrob. I’m now at the tail end of two more parallel games on RallyTheTroops.com and have a better handle on why I find myself thinking about it day and night.

I ran across a helpful quote from Chris Farrell from the July 14 edition of his superb Substack newsletter, Illuminating Games. In the course of talking about Red Dust Rebellion, Jarrod Carmichael’s weighty futuristic entry into the couinterinsurgency, or COIN, system , he said this: “The defining feature of COIN is that you can never really get anything done. You’re at the mercy of the action deck for your activations, and actually taking a turn (which could be a trivial limited op) paralyzes you for the next card so you can never truly gain momentum. You can’t do anything complex or have much of a plan.”

Vijayanagara is built on a system called the Irregular Conflict Series, which is an offshoot of the COIN system, but everything he says here I find is also true of Vijayanagara. The forced cool-down of having your empire’s action counter stuck in the Ineligible box for what feels like decades is agonizing as you watch your eligible enemies disassemble your board position. Throw in the volatility of the events and you can quickly feel like you’re in a lifeboat with one oar, 10-foot swells coming at you from all directions.

Vijayanagara: Deccan Empires of Medieval India - In the latest of my series of matches against Michal and David, I’m playing as the Bahmani Kingdom (green) and find myself in an unusually fierce contest for the lower regions of the map.

But this is a feeling I’ve come to embrace as a beginning-level player of this game. A lot of it has to do with how my brain works: It takes me an immense amount of effort and repetition — and even conscious emotional regulation — to be responsible for an outcome in long, hard-fought games where there’s a clear and unforgiving line from the decisions you made to the end result. There’s a reason I don’t fuck with chess.

For me, in-game chaos that hides perfect knowledge and short-circuits perfect plans is like a jester that lifts the anxiety of analysis paralysis and pleasantly scumbles what would otherwise be a picture of incompetence and ineffectual play. It pleasantly confuses the killjoy in my head that tells me the poor job I did was the only story. 

As somebody who craves a mix of pure experience, exploration, surprise and the occasional win, the jester of fate shows me happy troughs in between the waves where I can make a satisfying and clever tactical move without seizing at the terror of being responsible for a Grand Scheme. As I reflect on a loss, I can savor ideas for improvement in digestible pieces because they sit alongside a comforting serving of “Well, there wasn’t shit I coulda done about that.”

Vijayanagara is giving it all to me right now: The spark of competition, the right level of detail and weight, an intriguing time and place, and the delight of a rambunctious story I’m only partially responsible for writing.

Other notes on what is making this so fun for me:

1. Getting to play it on Rally the Troops: My opponents in the two simultaneous virtual games are spread from Vancouver to Krakow to Perth. That’s a lot of time in between turns to study and savor the board. The deliberative pace helps me. I can ignore the first stab of disappointment at seeing one of my cherished regions overtaken by a neighbor who I thought I had under control and think about it a second time, a third. Put me at a table where that’s happening, I flounder and sink under the pressure, making unfocused and spastic moves. This mode of play is a perfect midpoint between merry skull-bashing and the contemplative.

2. I only knew about Timur, also known as Tamerlane, in relation to Eurocentric history. I think at one point the Pope or somebody sent an emissary to him because Rome thought the Mongols were Christians and might help them subdue the Levant for Jesus and loot? Now I’m looking up figures and cultures from all over Asia as their own galaxy with its own centers of gravity instead of as a distal chapter in the movement of European kings, which I think is one of the things the design team wanted to get boardgamers to think about.

3. I love how the game has historical acts that match the play, mimic the arc of history, and force an interesting finish for everybody: It’s great to be the Sultanate in the early game, when you can crush almost anything in your line of sight and the Mongols haven’t shown up yet. It’s great to be the breakaway Bahmani Kingdom in the middle game, when you can carve off fat servings of the Sultanate’s provinces as their grip starts to weaken and use your moneymaking ability to hassle the nascent Vijayanagara with cavalry strikes. In the late stage, enjoy being a Vijayanagaran Rajas who can vent north over the board, your slow-building strength manifesting right as your rivals have just about punched themselves out.

There’s a mix of experience levels in the two separate games I’m playing, but in each one, the game’s aggregate messiness somehow pushes the cluster of victory point markers close enough to each other at the finish so that even a faction that got ground into the dirt three turns ago can tip the scales or even seize the win before the final Mongol assault on Delhi closes the whole thing out. As to whether this forgiving bit of slack is built into the design as a leveling device or a function of my two groups’ general experience or playstyle, I’m not certain.

4. I love the asymmetry, both in how it models its setting and incentivizes each of the sides in this 100-plus-year push and pull. After two plays as the mighty Sultanate, I tried commanding the Bahmani Kingdom. It was a delicious new vantage point that required new thinking; I wasn’t a guy who could throw tens of thousands of troops around the board anymore in between feeding bits of meat to the hunting falcon on my wrist.

I had to learn the nuances of the Deccan Influence track, a specialized part of the challenger kingdoms’ dashboards that forces the Vijayanagara and Bahmani players to think about when and where they should take a break from playing cat-and-mouse with the Sultanate and instead chuck something mean and pointy over their neighbor’s fence. The Bahmani’s influence track has different motivations and rewards than Vijayanagara’s. With how much Rally the Troops lightens the mechanical burden, it’s easy to step into different roles and shortcut to thinking about the possibilities of what you can do instead of how you can do it.

I have a pledge on GMT’s website for the second printing of this game. I love everything thing about it and I want a physical copy so I can also play it solo whenever I like using the bot decision cards for NPKs — non-player kingdoms. This game found me at the right time and I intend to make countless circuits across its engaging and hotly contested green expanse.

2025 Indie Board Game and TTRPG Preview: Check My Small-Game Haul

This is adapted from the script of Episode 98, “ˆLight and Get Away, It’s the Fall Small Games Preview.”

So back in Episode 96 we met Walt, who told us about Carolina Death Crawl from Bully Pulpit games — a roleplaying game that turns you and three others into Carolina boys who signed up for the Union army and who just got stuck together behind Confederate lines after Potter’s Raid, a real life late-war action by the Union to strike at the Rebs’ railroad supply lines.

The longer I marinated on what Walt told me about the game, the more attractive the concept looked: A historically based TTRPG that quick-starts stories and characters that you bring to life. The handful of plot points of the mission are propelled by character flaws and motivations instead of tactical stuff, and the outcome always promises to be grim: Only one character is going to make it home.

Carolina Death Crawl TTRPG: “I have provisioned myself for the terrors ahead and tremble to think of what I may find.”

I got my set of cards in the mail yesterday and I just met Walt’s group on Discord. We’re gonna play this thing and I’m already thinking about whether I want to go method and try a Southern Carolina accent. Of course, there are other decisions to be made beforehand, including what tone we want to set: a comedic adventure, a mournful horror slog, or something else.

The cards in this Carolina Death Crawl box have a series of plot cues, each with surefooted period language and flavor, suggesting a propulsive and lean storytelling exercise with minimal overhead and lots of character development. 

The nice thing? I don’t have to sell the experience to anyone. I failed at that when I bought a Mork Borg design with a killer-looking book a few years ago and realized that when the locals say “roleplaying” they really just mean D&D. It’s like trying to talk food with people who only like Applebee’s.

Fortunately for me, Walt’s group are passionate indie TTRPG dudes, so I’m eager to see how one of these games are run and stretch my collaborative storytelling muscles inside Carolina Death Crawl’s economical framework. Look for a session report on that before the year is out.

Also on the way: Pyrotechnics, a two-player card game designed by Michael Byron Sprague and published by designer Jason Katzwinkel’s The Seahorse and the Hummingbird venture. I bought a one-yard-from-the-finish-line prototype of this because I watched Jason’s feed for years as he built small-game designs in public, wrestling with and solving everything from visual design to game structure to the undergirding math of the thing. It was fascinating. It’s the thing I want to point people to when they hear I have a boardgame podcast and I like playing games: “Well why don’t you make your own game?” Because that shit is hard, that’s why. Why don’t you make a game where you shut up?

Anyhow, Pyrotechnics promises a 10-minute playtime in which you and your opponent are fireworks designers, each trying to be the first one to empty out the cards in their hand. This effort runs off three simple actions — Research, Discover, and Showcase for when you’re ready to drop a new display from your R&D shed — but it looks like the fireworks in terms of thinkiness comes in the form of an economy of six colored token varieties called “Sparks.” When you pick one of the three actions, you trigger mandatory exchanges of Major and Secondary Sparks that keep them moving between your supply — and your opponent’s.

Pyrotechnics from The Seahorse and the Hummingbird: Two players compete via a three-action and token exchange system to set off the best fireworks and be the first to empty their hand.

I’m impressed by the quality of this prototype, but not surprised. Based on what I saw Katz post on the average day, even his preliminary output is sharp and tight and fastidious in the good sense of the word. Use of color, type, and space, down to the satisfying heft of the accordion-fold rulebook and guide, shows pro-level thinking from Katz, game designer Michael Sprague, graphics guy Gavin Pouliot and editor David Kessler.

“Think Deep and Play Light,” urges a piece of text on one of the player guide panels. The latter directive seems wonderfully easy to meet: I got all the pieces out, read the rules…it was late on a hot afternoon and my brain was half-spent, but even one trip through the components and I knew I could sit down and test-run this two-handed on any given morning. 

As for “Think Deep”: I’m curious to feel my way through how the flow of Spark tokens drives the tough decisions and creates opportunities for ruses. As a piece of descriptive copy on the game’s landing page promises, “You’ll bluff, block, and bait your opponent—timing your Research, Discover and Showcase just right to outmaneuver them.” 

Here’s hoping. As reported to me in DMs by Jason Katzwinkel, this pretty little game is 99.4% complete and will be available soon for a modest $15.

One thing missing from my summer mornings in 2025 has been a quick-player solo game to cycle along with the first few cups of coffee. Enter Battle Card from Postmark Games, who specialize in beautiful print-and-play puzzle and adventure games.

Battle Card is a bid to make a historically faithful strategic wargame that presents you with the same decisions a WWII general would have had to make, but at a highly streamlined satellite’s-eye view. 

This game unites a publisher and a designer I admire: Postmark’s typically brilliant and efficient graphic design with game designer David Thompson, who has a special knack for interpreting the drama and details of a wartime setting into a wide variety of accessible tabletop experiences. The hit Undaunted series was his brainchild. He designed Resist! a solo game set during the Spanish Civil War. Another of his designs, Pavlov’s House, is on my table right now. 

Battle Card lets him flex his gift for lightweight elegance inside Postmark’s maximum-value-with-minimum pieces ethos: All you need is a printout of whatever map you want to try and a fistful of your own six-sided dice, which represent division- or army group-level units whose values change as they attack or defend.

Battle Card, The Malayan Campaign: Allied forces (white dice) try to find the best mix of “fight and flee” to lose with honor against the Imperial Japanese Army (big red craps dice).

Right now I’m looking at a map of the Malayan Campaign, when Japanese forces swiftly overran British Commonwealth and Allied defenses. In this one you take the role of Allied forces who had to slow the advance of the surging Imperial Japanese Army long enough to organize a retreat to Singapore, a major British stronghold.

As the Brits and their cohort, you’re not going to “win” in the pure sense, but you get the essence of the pressure the commanders were under — find the right balance of retreat and rearguard attacks to get the bulk of your men and machines back to Singapore without getting blown to shit. All with one page of rules.

This could be a long string of fun mornings, I thought to myself. Then I looked at the download folder and realized that for five pounds UK, I also had map files and concise rules for:

• Operation Market Garden, when the Allies tried to airdrop their way to a European invasion foothold in 1944.

• The Battle of Moro River, where you play as Canadians contending the Germans for key ground during winter conditions in Italy.

• Operation Brevity, a Commonwealth forces effort to relieve the siege of Tobruk in North Africa while seizing key ground from Rommel. 

• The Battle of Mortain, when Americans tried to fend off German counterattacks during the big summer of 44 push in France. 

• Operation Eidelweiss, where a German player races to lock down southern Russian oil fields in ’42.

And it doesn’t look like the same rules and challenges were just cut-and-pasted into a different-shaped maps. I’m seeing wrinkles that change dynamics, objectives and tactics — for example, the effect of weather is factored in for Moro River. 

Jesus Christ. All for five pounds? This is simply an insane value right off the bat. More on this as I get my teeth into the introductory sheets. [UPDATE: I’ve recorded my impressions of the introductory battles — Malaya and Market Garden — in Episode 99: Battle Card Review + Meet The Lads of “War With a Mate”]

Speaking of insane value, “free” ranks pretty high up there. My big bro Noisy Andrew — who is my opponent and teacher for learning Squad Leader — has been prepping a copy of his print-and-play design, Dive Dive Dive, for me.

It’s a coop game for 1-4 players inspired by The Hunters — a classic solitaire U-boat game from GMT Games. Andrew wanted to present his own twist on it. So when he’s done trimming cardboard, I’ll also be trying my hand at dueling with Allied Atlantic convoys per his system.

Dive Dive Dive: Cutaway of your sub and key systems status. Image: partymeeple

Noisy is like your kind big brother who knows how to do everything. Every day he’s elbow deep in fixing a friend’s car, working on real boats he knows how to sail, playing with instruments, and also making small games, many of which are free to try.

This is a good chance for me to engage with something a pal made and broaden the range of wargames I get to experience without committing to a big-box purchase and a six-week grind with a ruleset. We’ll circle back to ol’ Noisy with complaints and questions, not only about how the game works, but why he was inspired to make his own tweaks to one of wargaming’s most beloved modern naval campaign designs.

Oh yeah, remember Walt and Carolina Death Crawl from the beginning of this preview? He is also shipping me a copy of Lichoma, a meatpunk TTRPG designed by Strega van den Berg, with writing and editing support from Tessa Winters; Ashley Kronebusch, Ian Long, and Walt, who operate under the Bogfolk collective banner. 

They successfully Kickstarted this grim and bawdy commentary on capitalist reductionism in a town where meat — to wear, to eat, to sell, to kill, to screw — is the last economic cornerstone of a collapsing city’s economy. There’s nothing left to extract — except your muscle tissue and a few laughs. 

“Bodies are grafted together pieces of shit that solely serve as meat-machines to perform labor. It doesn’t matter anymore who you are.” Image: Strega Wolf van den Berg/Bogfolk

In a future episode, Walt’s going to talk me through how and why this was made — and how it is played. Get an eyeful of Lichoma for yourself on itch.io or watch the crew play it on YouTube, where the Plus One Exp channel hosted a live session.

I’ve been watching it in bits; they seem to be going at it in a highly comedic way. I just saw a buildup scene where the party hit a giant weapons store en route to a contract grudge demolition of a popular ferris wheel and a character named Grub Grub, who keeps a seeing-eye cockroach in a kangaroo-like pouch on their midsection, was musing about whether or not the roach should have its own firearm. I’m also digging the group’s rapport and in-character banter.

Watch this blog and future episodes of Breakup Gaming Society for impressions and playthroughs of titles from this grab-bag of indie tabletop inspiration.

King of Tokyo Headhunter Mod: Can Gambling Save This Game?

This is adapted from the script of Episode 98, “ˆLight and Get Away, It’s the Fall Small Games Preview.”

Let’s talk about King of Tokyo: Headhunter Edition, which is something I made up because I’m already pretty firm that King of Tokyo should not be played sober. I never enjoyed the after-dinner family time-wasting sessions. It didn’t look like anybody else did, either. But as a nightcap, with a bit of hooch to get your bloodlust up and make the dice sound like war drums? That’s when the game appears.

I’ve always wondered if you could juice King of Tokyo up, make it meaner, cut it right down to the sensation of the kill. Plus add modest stakes. So I tried it out on some pals at the tail end of happy hour at the Hilton Gardens Inn.

Oh no, it’s MegaBoring from Planet Who Gives a Shit

For the handful of people who don’t play boardgames but who arrived at this post anyway: King of Tokyo is an easy-to-learn dice-chucking kaiju battle designed by Richard Garflied, the same guy who designed Magic: The Gathering. It is a riot…if you’re seven or you’re an adult who wears Crocs. It’s a “king of the hill” battle with you and up to five enemy monsters duking it out in Tokyo.

In the off-the-shelf version, you can eliminate other monsters by reducing their health to zero, but also win by stacking victory points. For the Headhunter Edition, I made a few drastic modifications:

• Taking every card focused on victory points out of the upgrade deck, leaving only attack and recovery stuff

• Stipulating a $5 ante for each monster. If you die, whatever cash that’s under the base of your monster goes to the monster who landed the blow. And so on until there’s a bunch of dead monsters and one monster roaring, holding everybody’s gas money.

• Final mod: If you finish a turn with three of any numeral showing on the dice, you add that many dollars to your monster’s ante, making you a more profitable target.

So how did it go? It sucked. Mechanically, the big downside was that monsters, rather than being goaded into an insane slaughter, built up an immense field of upgrade cards that made killing them almost impossible. I envisioned quick-fatality matches, direct lines to modest but still exciting piles of blood money, emptying pockets and building grudges.

Didn’t happen. There we were in the lobby of the Hilton Gardens after, I don’t know, 45 minutes, with the dinner crowd coming in and all the monsters politely parked on their original antes. We broke camp after a beer and took our money back.

I think the best outcome would have been if maybe a kid had wandered over and wanted to play. “Sure,” you tell it, “go tell your Mom you need some money for snacks.” Ideally this would lead to some kind of scene where you fleece the rugrat for $20 and it melts down because you keep killing its monster and taking its money and the parents get furious and you get banned from the property. That would at least make a memorable final King of Tokyo session. I bet I could juice a few hundred local clicks off the trespass warnings alone.

Me and the boys talked briefly about ways to improve it — such as getting rid of all the defensive cards, too — but I think the biggest improvement is to just give this box away to somebody with kids. I’m not capable anymore of the amount of drinking I’d have to do to care about this game again.