SETI Board Game: Anatomy of a Turn (Turn One, Round 3)

“Good news!” wrote one Redditor when I posted my first SETI play report on a board game sub. “You have fundamentally misunderstood SETI and played a much worse game of your own invention instead of SETI, so you'll have more fun next time :)”

So with the catcalls from more experienced players ringing in my ears. I set the game back up on the easiest solo setting and walked it again.

Here’s a blow-by-blow video report of the first turn of Round 3.

EDIT: NOPE, I messed it up again. You get to launch a probe for one energy during a Scan action, not as a bonus launch during a Launch action. Had to watch my own work four times before I caught the mistake.

More thoughts on my first proper playthrough coming up March 15 in Episode 112.

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Win my giveaway pile of indie tabletop charmers. Details in Episode 110. Listen here.

You’ve got until the end of March 2026 to enter: Win indie tabletop artifacts from Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games, The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, and Ada Press.

Three Boom-Bap Big-Crew Bangers You Might Not Have Heard Yet

One of the ways I defend myself from automated spectacles and simulation is digging back to artifacts I know I can trust. 

One blessing about being a Gen Xer? I got to live half my life in the pre-internet era. I’ve got the frame of reference that helps me find and remember real-deal media, confident that the vibration I’m getting, even via YouTube ,came from human vocal chords and real people in a real neighborhood that jangled and whomped in a real place in time.

Nothing whomped better than that big-crew phase of boom bap that hit its peak around 1993-94. Think Leaders of the New School. Onyx. Fu-Schickens. Think massive snare hits yoked to a jazz bass sample and a chaser of echoing horns. 

I thought I’d mapped all the major and minor points of the this microera when I picked my way past the most obvious plays and started adding tracks by outfits like Rumpletilskinz and Yaggfu Front.

I was just scratching the surface. Here for a jolt of authentic energy is a crew called Now Born Click, whose cassette EP goes for a lot of money on Discogs; I don’t think they hung around long enough to make an album.

Lace your Timbs up for this one:

Here’s another stomper for you: “Trouble Wreck” by the Troubleneck Brothers, all seven of them.

They got this one on rotation on Rap City, where you can see they’re running every part of the template, both in track production and video style, because it looks like they got half the city out for the take where they’re quasi-moshing for the shouted chorus. I still prefer the audio:

So you know Ice T, right? His production and rhyming posse was Rhyme Syndicate.

Somehow, there was a dude from the UK who was loosely affiliated with them named Red Venom.

Anyway, here’s a crew called Freakin Inglish from Salford & Manchester getting in on the act. I think they understood the assignment:

It takes a human guide to get to the best, I think still. Because while imaginationless AI hyperscalers ruin the future, they’re making unwelcome raids on memory, too.

Now I have to be careful when hunting down an old audiobook because they’re scraping my favorite novels and reading those with robots and doing cultural retrospectives whose scripts stink of LLM phraseology.

You’re better off trusting people for the good stuff.

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Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience

NINJA BORG RPG Session: Kill Cheap Trick Live at Budokan

Walton Wood and Rugose Kohn, the makers of NINJA BORG, let me come along for a special ninja mission that left me conflicted: Some degenerate record producer wanted to stick my and Rugose’s ninjas into a time machine so we could go back to 1978 and eliminate Chicago power-pop legends Cheap Trick right on stage during their career-resurrecting gig at Budokan in Japan.

With the boys’ help, I created a bitter former Applebee’s prep cook ninja (Maudy “Ultimate Trio” Yeggers aka Toxic Smoker the Laconic) who feels extremely put upon when the action compromises a) his smoke breaks b) his compulsion to keep eating the fare of his former employer. My teammate was Martoke “Karen” Tagit aka Festering Warlock the Punisher, who got excellent mileage out of the Roomba he rides around on.

With Walt guiding the action as the Motherfuckin’ Ninja Master and Rugose ensuring my incessant dialog didn’t make the action sag, we got about the business of the game’s bloody combat and hyperconductive silliness.

The complete audio of this event is below.

Maudy “Ultimate Trio” Yeggers: NINJA BORG character sheet. I didn’t draw my guitar, but it broke anyway.

How to Win My L’il Pile of Indie Tabletop Games

I do not have enough life left or wind in my lungs to play and talk about the inspired indie design work that crosses my feed every day. Especially from small designers who put a high level of verve or craft in their work.

I can’t play ‘em all. But nothing’s stopping me from just buyin’ the fuckin’ things whenever I’ve got a spare $20 or so — and celebrating their makers as I’m able.

In the last few months I’ve acquired a small pile of worthy indie creations and I’m giving ‘em away. Listen to Episode 110’s Game of the Week segment to hear descriptions of these games and learn how to win.

Here’s what’s up for grabs:

The Seahorse and The Hummingbird’s Book of Wandering
Written by Jason Katzwinkel and edited by David Kessler

This is a magic book whose spell only works if you surrender control of the artifact.

Did you ever hear the story of HitchBOT, the wandering robot whose simple instructions let it hitchhike, getting passed from person to person? ‘Round about 2015 HitchBOT made it across parts of Europe and Canada. The U.S. leg of its tour proved fatal. I think it used up its luck getting through Boston, because Philly was the end of that poor little motherfucker.

The Book of Wandering applies the same concept in a lower-risk vehicle: A handsome bound booklet whose simple directive is to fill a page with something that gives you joy, then pass it along. You can opt to give it a one-way ticket or put your return address on the back cover in hopes of peering into the hearts of people to whom it stuck, however briefly.

This is how I started one of my Books of Wandering. It probably wandered straight to some lameass who threw it in a drawer.

I’ve released two of these books into the wild. The feeling of trying to imagine whose hands it would pass through, what they would feel, what they would write, opened up underutilized circuits in my mind and heart.

Read the intro text as the book speaks to you, announcing your temporary bond. Tell me you don’t feel a bit of parasocial electricity, tell me you don’t start mapping imagined pinpoints in the world. It’s simple, but effective, wizardry via shared semi-collaborative, quasi-randomized journaling.

This power I will hand to the winner of this contest.

Grumpy Spider Games’ Rucksack

I bought a copy of Rucksack because I’ve always been impressed by the shelf-ready gleam that David David and his collaborators achieve with these games. In Episode 73, I featured Grumpy Spider’s Pocket Book Adventures, a ringbound solo dungeoncrawler with a nifty pencil dexterity skill check. 

David told me he designed Rucksack just for the casuals in your life who would enjoy games in the vein of Balderdash, Funemployed, Snake Oil or Apples to Apples. 

In Rucksack, players are thrown into survival scenarios with random collections of items that may or may not be useful. You must ingeniously pitch your fellow players about why these items will help you endure, with a voting system determining who’s the best pretend survivalist. Into the prize bag it goes.

Long Tail Games’ Tiny Tome 2

Many years ago I got exceedingly curious about how vibrant and experimental the indie tabletop roleplaying scene had become. That curiosity led me to buy Long Tail Games’ Tiny Tome 1, which had 50 playable RPGs, all on standard poker cards and curated by Long Tail from designers across the world. 

The range of concepts on these things was extremely broad, and that was its strength. I used to fan through them and read them at night, just savoring the tingle of standing at all those thresholds: mini dungeon crawlers, wry social games, conceptual journaling stuff, games where the card itself becomes the “dice” that got you to explore your surroundings. 

Now there’s Tiny Tome 2. And I have it. Except this time it’s a book where each submission — compiled by Long Tail’s Ash Hauenschild — has its own spread so the creators could include more detail. 

Let’s flip to a couple pages here…

• Yap by Frances Diederich
You’re going to trace a character’s journey only as glimpsed through their online reviews and snapshot their travails and triumphs as you’re sent place to place.

• Compact by Levi Kornelson
Players of compact — and their Guide — will tease out the tough particulars of how a specialized social order sorts out against the backdrop of the characters’ backstories and the purpose of the group, which can be a brigade, a cadre, a caravan, a crew, a college, a society, or a troupe of performers. Fictional conditions from the Guide will help the players imagine the historical or regional forces at work as they try to achieve unity. 

• Koriolan by Alexander Nachaj
This is billed as Cassette Futurism Sci-Fi Horror. All these words are arousing to me. 

These are just three of the 47 games or supplements in this book. You could spend the rest of your life flipping around in this toybox.

Ada Press: D6 Things This Dog Will Tell You, Othership, and The Taming of the Slugiraffe

These is virtually on the pile: Christopher John Eggett and his pressmate Mary McGroary make, in their words, “stupid little games.” Our winner gets an Itch.io key that unlocks all three. Let’s take a look at each:

1. D6 Things This Dog Will Tell You
The first is as advertised. You can treat it as a lark or a cool mission/backstory generator. Roll a D6. The pictured dog says something. Run with the animal’s scene-setting chops if that’s what you’re feeling.

2. Othership
A forlorn space hulk sci-fi horror affair where you’re raiding alien vessels for loot, which first appeared in Wyrd Science Magazine. As the FAQ puts it when asked if this is a purposeful truncation of the Mothership game, and I quote:

A: Exactly! Mothership is famous for how complicated it is. So I thought I would simplify it for fun and to save paper (this is an approximately 99% optimization on Mothership). Additionally, we're using less dice with smaller numbers, which I am led to believe is good for the environment. 

There you go. Compact, dangerous, and wry.

Othership: One of three Ada Press works you can get in this contest.

3. Taming of the Slugiraffe
You, a Giblet, must venture into a yawning pit in quest of the titular beast, which once used to ferry your insignificant folk around. I guess Giblets are sort of the punching bags of the game’s world, so finding the Slugiraffe is going to get you major props and help the other Giblets tremendously. If you survive.

That’s what’s on the prize pile so far.

How to Win These Charmers: Rules and Conditions

1. I’ve buried a secret word in the Track of the Week segment of Episode 110. When you hear it, put it in the subject line of an email to: chief [DOT] rocka[AT]BreakupGamingSociety.com. Bam. You’re entered.

2. On April 1, I draw a winner from people who followed the rules in Step 1.

None of these creators had any hand in this promotion, nor have I received any compensation for featuring their work. If there’s one thing they did wrong, it was making something interesting in the line of sight of a derelict with a microphone and an extra 10 bucks in his pocket.

Again, keep an ear out for that secret word in Track of the Week.

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Listen to Episode 110 for prize descriptions and how to enter.

Crate Digging: February 2026 (YouTube Music Edition)

6 YouTube Music Videos I Watch Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over

Dave Lombardo -- War Ensemble -- Yankee Stadium

“There’s no joy here,” Augustus Crimes said during one of our drunken phone calls when I asked him to check out the video. He was right in a way he didn’t know: Lombardo left Slayer because he was turning in shifts like this with constant touring and not even breaking $100K/year. But still, what power and efficiency. Talk about setting up your workspace for optimized thrash. I love watching how the arrangement of his kit enables his technique, no motion wasted for those fills and rolls. Hell of a shift, even if it was exploitation.

Mountain - Don't Look Around (1971)
You’re missing out on what music is if you haven’t lost a night in Beat-Club’s feed. It looks like this German music show started out as a goof-ass lip sync thing, but became a font of incredible live studio sets by the late ‘60s. I think stumbling around Thee Oh Sees’ work at random over the course of the 2020s primed the ear tissue I needed to revisit heavy acid/blues rock minus my usual prejudices. My personal highlight: Right around the bridge when the camera pans left and you can see bassist Felix Pappalardi’s authoritative, lightning fretwork and how he’s working inside drummer Corky Laing’s Operation Barbarossa-level assault on those skins.

Giant Steps Coltrane Solo on Banjo
I still remember the night around 1999, coming home sweaty, drunk and stoned from the club with Rachel; we were just going to pass out, but I threw on Coltrane’s Giant Steps with only the slatted light from the street in the room, gaping at the speaker with my head at the foot of the bed, unable to turn away. I’m still learning about what those giant steps were composed of and why they were giant. Seeing others return to it — a kid with a banjo whose peers are coughing irradiated blue Taks on their phone screens in time with the algo — is a nourishing morsel on a night of compulsive Tubing, when you’re running out the clock before bed, looking for nothing, and then something finds you.

Cherry Wainer & Don Storer - Peter Gun (1966)
Beat-Club again, this time found through Dust to Digital’s supreme curation. The immediacy of this, Wainer mugging eccentrically in that trim dress with white piping as she and Storer unlock the power of this spy chestnut. You’ll crave Hammond organ tones for a month after this. It might be a detour into a whole new analog second life or give weight to the suspicion that you were born in the wrong time.

The Pirates "Lonesome Train" 1977
I’ll trade you all the phones-up arena shows in the world for this night at Dingwalls in 1977. The Pirates, after innumerable lineup changes and mutations since Johnny Kidd and The Pirates’ 1960s smash “Shakin’ All Over,” sweating like pigs with legend Mick Green hammering the holy piss out of his guitar, absolutely owning their lane in a punk-crazy London.

The Cramps - Tear It Up (Live - Urgh! A Music War) 1980
Over the years I backed into an appetite for what this band did, roistering in that locus of rockabilly power and the panting sex- and death-drive of the genre with transgressive theatrics. Lead creature Lux Interior is a natural for this exercise and I never get tired of when the camera moves between his obscene cavorting and Poison Ivy chewing her gum and looking bored as hell. This expertly cleaned-up VHS footage told me in one document why I’d been quietly loving this band more and more over the 2000s.

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Win my giveaway pile of indie tabletop charmers. Details in Episode 110. Listen here.

You’ve got until the end of March 2026 to enter: Win indie tabletop artifacts from Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games, The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, and Ada Press.

Classic Hip Hop Sample Chasing: Death in Vegas Back to Roxanne Shanté

I still return to Death in Vegas’ 1997 LP, Dead Elvis. The album’s kind of a sketchbook of electronic styles of the time, like they were playing around (at a high level of execution), sipping from all the styles of the era.

Because of what I was into at the time, I got the CD so I could play a track called “Dirt” to death:

I still love Dirt’s splicing of contemporary techno effects and rhythm to the driving, spacy, and dirty psychedelic music festival vibe.

One of the layering passages that makes it go, and which kept it in rotation in my apartment, was the simple classic addition of a repeated hip hop vocal sample. Capping a build this way is always a nice trick for getting that balance of necessary repetition and perceived forward motion. It’s still an extra little thrill for me when it builds up to the sample.

As the years went past, I started spending more time with the rest of the album, absorbing what they were up to here without just seeking the big-beat high of “Dirt.” 

If you like electronic music of the ‘90s generally, take a trip through this one. It has a wide range of textures, styles, and moods. Its lack of focus is its strength. During these repeat visits, the track “Rekkit” became my favorite. It’s absolutely beautiful, especially the shift to the driving bass-first melody of the chorus:

During these same years, I was also reeducating myself on hip hop by following YouTube Music’s suggestions to some interesting cul-de-sacs. And I shouted one morning when I placed it. That vocal sample was Roxanne Shanté from her track “Big Mama”!

“Big Mama” was the third track on The Bitch is Back, listed as her second and last album in 1992. Nowadays, she’s properly revered as a First Lady of Hip Hop who was at the epicenter of NYC’s pivotal moments. 

Netflix even did a biopic about her a few years back and everybody acknowledges the years when, only 14, she connected with upcoming production legend Marley Marl, who also lived in the Queensbridge housing projects, and became a member of what would be the Juice Crew. 

The Roxanne Wars that started with her response (“Roxanne’s Revenge”) to a UTFO track set off hip hop’s first large-scale diss track frenzy. More comedic and mild than the bloodsport that marked the next two decades, but still a phenomenon. Even crews that had nothing to do with it were pumping out Roxanne response records.

She also figured prominently in the Bridge Wars when the Juice Crew got sideways with the Bronx, whose war shaman was a young KRS-ONE. Roxanne went right at him.

But all that was in the mid/late ‘80s. This was 1992, and “Big Mama” feels like Shante’s already fighting for recognition here. So she goes down swinging by going after other female rappers en masse after opening with her credentials.

In the first verse she’s leaning hard on that ‘80s resume. Then she turns her attention to Queen Latifah and Monie Love, who had a huge breakout with their “Ladies First” collaboration. Shanté shits all over that.

MC Lyte was next in the line of fire, showing that in stuff made on the streets for the streets, homophobic attacks were fair game with women combatants, too.

And just to round things out geographically, she pivots finally to Yo-Yo, the female member of Ice Cube’s Lench Mob, calling her an overweight slut,. This verse is when you get the line that Death in Vegas sampled:

I never traced what, if anything, the fallout from this record was. But it has yielded the secret word for the indie game giveaway I’m doing, which is: QUEENSBRIDGE. Put that word in the subject line of an email and send it chief [dot] rocka [at] BreakupGamingSociety.com.

If you want to talk board games or hip hop in the body of the email, we can do that, but that subject line is your entry to win all the indie games I talked about in Episode 110.

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Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience

NINJA BORG TTRPG: The Game that Says “Yes” to Hysterical Killing

Would you like to go on an ‘80s movie-style ninja killing spree? Get off some one-liners? Pick from 32 shurikens for no reason other than that it’s beautiful and fun?

Walton Wood and Rugose Kohn, the makers of NINJA BORG, made a pretty book that lets you arm up with a ludicrous backstory and start the sneaking, slicing, and dicing. Why get borged down in the details?

I queried them about the thinking behind the RPG book — and the blood-drenched results. A lot of results.

Our Fantasy Flight Games Golden Era: A Personal Retrospective

Let’s begin here: It’s 2011 and I’m picking away at a freelance assignment at the kitchen table, probably a blog post about ERP systems for energy companies. It’s a late summer morning, still cool in the little rented house where I have joined my wife- and stepkids-to-be. The eldest is on the couch. I’m tracking him in my periphery as he works on the online summer catchup math course they made him take.

The morning pivots on one sound: His finishing up the day’s module and snapping his laptop shut. Mine shuts the second after, he’s up and moving to the table, grinning, and I’m working the suction-tight lid off Space Hulk: Death Angel. 

We start the ceremony of randomizing which two-Terminator squads we’ll command. We always take it as a good sign if we pull the team that has Brother Claudio in it. We wince if we get the team with Gabriel in it. 

Space Hulk: Death Angel - Genestealers everywhere, Claudio doesn’t give a shit, he’s going in

We don’t yet know how to employ warriors like Gabriel; at this point the whole game exists for one foundational thrill, which is using Claudio’s special attack to send him charging, twin power claws humming, directly into a throng of Genestealers. Which he will kill. His signature attack always eliminates three alien swarms, but there’s a one-in-six chance he dies every time he executes the maneuver. 

We can feel Claudio’s power weapons moving against the game’s generated fear at the end of his armored mitts. We don’t even know the word “Ameritrash” yet, but we are about to become a Fantasy Flight Games household.

Classic Fantasy Flight Designs: About to Become the Foundation of Our Food Pyramid

That little box came with a catalog. Arkham Horror and Chaos in the Old World arrived next. Over the next six years, so did Citadels, Merchant of Venus, Tannhauser, Fury of Dracula, Wiz-War, Red November, Cosmic Encounter, Game of Thrones, Netrunner, and possibly the deepest I’ve ever fallen in love with anything: Warhammer 40,000 Conquest: The Card Game.

Sometimes these games arrived in the arms of the perfect people, as if we’d planted a beacon to muster them. My future wife was a very sociable, bargoing person who relayed that beacon’s signal to the ideal recipients. All of a sudden we had them out of the bar and at our table every Saturday instead. Which was also a kind of bar, admittedly.

Grotesque, ashen “regular life” cut out the supports from that luminous stage, as it always does: Somebody knocks their girlfriend up, somebody else moves away, and in the span of a few months, the boxes go inert because that shared group investment in grasping their logic and drama is lost. We had cool people and good nights at our table, but never that again. 

Our Golden Era limped to a close. Asmodee acquired Fantasy Flight in 2014. My girlfriend and I married in 2015. By 2019 I was playing Warhammer 40,000: Conquest obsessively with a boys’ group I built and my wife and I were about to separate.

In between Space Hulk: Death Angel and Warhammer 40,000: Conquest were a string of Fantasy Flight titles that defined the micro-eras of our perfect group and showed us new mechanics and genres with each play.

Space Hulk: Death Angel
But for now, let’s rewind to the little box that started it all: Space Hulk: Death Angel, which I bought as a joke at the Barnes & Noble on Academy Boulevard for $20. It was about the size of a big paperback. The boy and I bonded over our mutual interest in W:40K lore. How much risk could that be?

Space Hulk: Death Angel Firsts (For Us)
• First game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe
• First co-op game
• First card-driven tactical combat game
• First Fantasy Flight game

What Are You Supposed to Do in Space Hulk: Death Angel?

Space Hulk: Death Angel pits you — in either solo mode or with up to five pals — against a forlorn and dangerous derelict vessel called the Sin of Damnation. You’re playing as Terminators from the vaunted Blood Angel Space Marine chapter. As the lore goes, this chapter was almost entirely wiped out the first time they boaded the craft, now they’re back to clean it out. You’re going to manage a desperate corner of that effort.

Blood Angels are 8+ feet tall even before putting on the Terminator suits. All but invulnerable to the average threat. Except the Sin of Damnation isn’t an ideal arena; lurking around the craft are swarms of Tyranid Genestealers who are faster, more numerous, and highly cunning. 

On an open field, there wouldn't be a story: The ridiculous Blood Angel firepower would turn the xenos to paste in seconds. But this abandoned craft’s many shadowed nooks even the odds as the bulky and slow Terminator suits clomp their way to the objective on the last room card, getting flanked and ambushed at every turn.

Designer Corey Konieczka’s job was to translate the successful larger-format Space Hulk board game into a card-driven battle that delivered the same tension and strategy. Your Marines are represented by a column of cards down the middle. Room features and alien enemy cards appear to your left and right, shifting as you change locations or your foe comes up with a new angle. You’ve got to maneuver and blast your way through a number of ship locations and survive long enough to get to the last card, which drops a final challenge in your lap.

Genestealers spawn on both sides of your column and attack constantly. Bad rolls or bad positioning can get you quickly washed away in a tide of probing, slashing claws. About a third of the time, you’re screwed by the second or third room because you’ve already lost too many of your Battle Brothers.

About another third of the time, you can fight your way through to the ultimate or penultimate room before being engulfed. No win on the table, but you can at least approach the Emperor on the Golden Throne knowing you did your Imperial best. 

And then you get the cinematic payoff in another 30% of the games: Hitting that last objective with just enough strength and time to fulfill the last room’s condition. It’s always a thrill: the squadmate who survives three blindside attacks, and in so doing, keeps the whole column from collapsing. Activating a room feature, such as the dramatic option to intentionally detonate a tank of fuel — that blunts the mass of Genestealers just enough to buy you time for an extra maneuver. The furious string of offense rolls that clears out every alien on a whole side of the column, getting you up out of your chair and flexing light a tight end that just caught the game winner in the end zone.

These thrills get richer the more you get inside the nuanced decision space of the game’s action scarcity, which abstracts the chaos of close-in fighting in a cramped, dangerous place: Each of your squads can only play one action per turn: Maneuver, attack, or play a Support action that shores up your fellows’ ability to survive attacks. 

And you can’t play the same action for a single squad on successive turns, which is a long way of saying that the juice of this game is realizing that you can’t blast your way out of all your problems and you’ve got to figure out how to make these humorless, clunky, genetically designed fanatics of yours pirouette like ballerinas through a mix of calculated risks, finessed positioning, and some good rolling. 

Each squad’s set of three commands also comes with sub-abilities unique to that team. I still take this game out and run it solo several times a year, and I think I’m still getting better at using the unique squad abilities at the right time.

If there’s one thing that’s changed since 2011, when I played this game to excess with my stepson, it’s seeing more power in the gestalt of all the actions rather than banking on good rolls and withering attacks. Which you’ll still need to win, but that minute footwork adds the dimension that rolls it all up into a boffo combination of theme, setting, cinematic evocation, and tense problem-solving.

Some copies of this game are still floating around on the secondary markets; I searched a minute ago and saw a few going for north of $200. So I’ll be holding on to mine, this well-matched sparring partner and its worn cards, which I finally had to sleeve because they were about one molecule thick, and most of that was grime.

The power of its suggested action, the old-baseball-mitt familiarity of it, still surpass the residual melancholy in the box. For the Emperor. For Sanguinius. For the mind that can nudge a servo motor just so in a kind of heaven, whole and complete.

The Chaplain has 10 swarms on two Marines, but he’s not quitting

Arkham Horror Second Edition: The Hulking Mess That Summoned the Perfect Monsters

While my stepson and I were playing the hell out of Space Hulk: Death Angel, I was staring holes in the little catalog that came in the Death Angel box. After all that staring, I added Arkham Horror Second Edition to our shelf.

This was an ambitious purchase: This heavy-fisted co-op adventure is not easy to learn and not easy to win as you and your pals — playing characters who find themselves in a 1922 town overrun with creatures from HP Lovecraft’s horror stories — get ground up in its arcane rulebook and cruel machinery.

I figured my stepson would jump in with both feet, but he surprisingly turned his nose up at first. I was bummed. Complained about it to his Mom.

“I’ll play with you,” she said. And not only did she play with me, she invited along four of her local dive bar homies . These people became the mainstay of our group for three years.

Here’s a scene I’ll never forget: Our dining room table was packed and we’d been at it all night. The character I pulled for that session was a nun who must have done something to anger the Christian god she served. If there was a cultist or creature roaming the streets, she’d run across it and lose to it in combat. I barely got anything done the whole game because Sister Mary was constantly laid up at the hospital or sanitarium, recovering from her latest mismatch on the foggy streets of Arkham, Massachusetts.

Losing your sanity or health points also means you have to discard items. The only thing she had left, outside of plenty of time to wonder if she’d banked on the wrong deity, was a very powerful two-handed sword she’d found at one of the game’s locations.

And my friend Gavin’s character wanted that sword. The rules said that characters in the same location could trade items, so there they were over my hospital bed telling me I had to give up the sword so somebody with a better chance could use it.

You better light another six candles, lady

This was a fascinating psychological case study: Since it’s a co-op game, making a sacrifice for the greater goal had its logic. But I was drunk — we all were — and I didn’t like the way he was badgering me. Sister Mary had no other items and not a dollar to her name. I would essentially be retired from the game, and I wanted to keep playing, so I told him to go pound sand.

I’m pretty sure we lost. But we lost a lot, because attention would sag badly by the third or fourth hour. There’d be more riffing and laughing than there was problem-solving and cooperation. Or immersion.

Arkham Horror tries to sell you pieces of the psychological displacement and invading alien gloom of Lovecraft’s work, but what you’re really doing is a big, messy version of the sci-fi/pulp movie arc: A bunch of Regular Folks from all walks of life find themselves up to their neck in supernatural horror, somehow learn to read spell books written 50,000 centuries ago, and shut the portals before the unnameable engulfs the town, and maybe the world.

There’s a dungeon exploration/RPG-lite aspect to it as you adjust your character’s skill track and stick your nose into Arkham’s seams in search of helpful items, but because of how we played, the team spirit and the attention required to keep the story meshed with group decision-making suffered. 

Another memory: Late in another game. I’d just gone to a new location, at which point you’re supposed to draw a card from that location, read the flavor text, and resolve the encounter. And nobody was listening. I was just wandering around the board on my own. It sucked.

The cure for this turned out to be playing 7 Wonders instead when we had six lushes at the table, but that’s not a Fantasy Flight title. But Arkham Horror came with us to our new house in 2012 and my wife-to-be and I figured out a better way to play it: Two players, each controlling two investigators apiece.

The lady and I had some killer Saturday afternoons this way. When you have two characters, you still have options if one falls on hard times; there wasn’t all the drinking and chatter, so we’d think together, move faster, and run better drills, such as assigning the best combat-focused investigators to tamp down trouble on the street while the more mentally gifted players dove through portals in an attempt to close and seal them, which is the best way to win.

If all the open portals hit critical mass, some shambling three-story-tall thing composed of stars, vapor, and malice walks out of one of the portals and you have to fight it. Which the lady and I also pulled off once in a feverish battle with one of the eight Old Gods who can pull up on you. Chucking a bundle of dynamite at a supernatural being when you’re being frozen from the inside out and bleeding from several cuts is a smashing way to finish an afternoon.

That box came down here to Starkville with me six years ago. I tried to play it solo once when everything here was still in boxes and my best piece of furniture was a Wal-Mart card table. I was pretty lit up when I got it out, and by the time I finished setting it up, I was legless. In my mind, I still knew how to play, but I found myself refreshing so many little rules that I made a drunken rant video about how the game’s too hard.

But I keep the box still for its timeless promise, the idea that I could walk in there any time and lose an afternoon in one of the best ways possible. It’s a fantasy in the same way that beating unnameable entities with Northeastern grit and gumption is a fantasy.

My stack of games now numbers in the teens after the 40-game giveaway. My ever playing Arkham Horror again instead of my more recent solo purchases is a longshot. Seeing the people I played it with is even more of a longshot than that.

But you have to permit yourself a few sentimental dreams once in a while, to look out upon the stars and imagine that haunted old galaxy from foreign sections of the sky will still be yours to plumb with the mountains of little cards and the hilarious antagonism of the game’s pressures on its players.

For now, the box stays as part of my Concrete Island collection.

Arkham Horror 2nd Edition Firsts

• First heavy adventure co-op
• First Lovecraft-themed game
• First game we did with six players
• First time I test-ran anything by myself for two days before sitting others down to it

Matt Thrower Shares His First Fantasy Flight Love

Below is an excerpt from Breakup Gaming Society’s far-ranging chat with board game reviewer Matt Thrower. We compared notes on the Fantasy Flight Games titles that first got us hooked, and how that happened.

Fantasy Flight Games (Alternate) History: The Glory of Tannhaüser’s Failed Skirmish Franchise Bid

Space Hulk: Death Angel had the boy and I thinking about ways to play deeper into Warhammer 40,000’s bloody sprawl.

The next logical move felt like getting into the boondoggle of the tabletop miniature version together. Except it didn’t work.

I got him one of the starter sets. He ran a few skirmishes with one of his buddies and then he and I spent a night throwing unpainted Orks and Ultramarines at each other. I loved the idea of joining the ranks of people who got deeply into these battles. But midway through our first match, I realized I just didn’t want to do this. The motion and detail I craved were mediated by a mechanical framework that left me cold on contact. 

I started wrongheaded arguments with active players on Reddit about why the system didn’t do what I wanted it to do. One of the mods of a Warhammer subreddit at the time said it best: “Dude, just go play something else.”

So we did.

That something else was Tannhaüser, a five-on-five squad combat game that takes place in 1949. But not our 1949: In this universe, World War 1 turned into an ugly grind that stretched into the 1940s and got an injection of uchronic tech and magic. You’ve got the uniform and weapon aesthetics of WW2, except the Germans are physically manifesting demonic influence and the Union forces tote experimental energy weapons around.

Fantasy Flight did a lot of acquisitions around this time, buying up extant games and lavishing them with reworked rules and insane production upgrades. The character tower portrait on the front of the Tannhauser box immediately signaled the action and its time-displaced setting: WW2 but not quite, a sci-fi comic book gleam wafting off every character portrait, every inch of the box that uses such rich pulp that it feels woven, the tone of the character mats, the rulebook.

This wasn’t Warhammer, but the scope of action and theme were an easy sell. The ruthless demonic relic-hunters of the Kaiser’s elite Obskura Korps and the Union’s 42nd Marine Special Forces have converged on a central European castle. The Krauts want to lock down a cornerstone relic that will help them bend this universe to their will for keeps. The Marines gotta stop ‘em.

The action can take place on the main floor or basement of the castle with a two-sided board. Of the five fighters on each team, three are heroes and two are utility squaddies, each of whom have their own player board and customizable gear. The minis are even painted right out of the box!

It was immediately engrossing in its scale and visual appeal, and while I enjoyed the relief of not having a couple dozen minis to think about, there was still lots of juice and variety: factors like rushing, overwatch, and initiative — with the combinations of characters, gear, and missions — felt like the right balance of interesting crunch and manageable scope and sane cost.

When Ameritrash ruled the table: We busted the spine on the original rulebook flipping back and forth to remember how stuff like grenade bounces work, so the boy reset it in a hard binder. He threw in the misspelling for free.

And as if the designers had read my mind, line of sight and targeting was intimate and slick. The game had a Pathfinder system that used tracks of colored circles from room to room. Share a color with an enemy? You can hit them and vice versa.

The game offered several modes, from deathmatch to king of the hill to story mode, and on top of that a bunch of back-of-the-book scenarios. The rulebook had pictures of minis and characters the base box didn’t even have. Who is Irishka Voronin and why can’t I use her R.U.R. cognitive module? Because she came with a separate Operation Novgorod set, which introduced the Russians under the rule of the Matriarchy.

The resurgent Japanese shogunate also had squads. There were standalone mercenary figures with their own rules and gear. Three Tannhauser novels were commissioned and printed. With the level of production and commitment to material, it felt like Fantasy Flight was going for a franchise here, but I quickly got the sense that not many other people were pushing these characters around a map. It just didn’t catch. The Tannhaüser base set still only clocks a 6.5 on BoardGameGeek.

For a time, it felt like a rowdy secret island that only the kid and I knew about. Was it balanced? I don’t know. Was it good? Could have been. Was I good at it? Absolutely not, but he and I played enough death matches on the castle’s main floor to train me out of my random setup and foolish opening moves.

You see, the Germans have to pile up a staircase to enter the main floor while the Union commandos bust in the front for faster spread and positioning. My stepson was a daredevil on and off the board; while I was enjoying the “toy soldiers” buildup of caravaning in through those stairs, his favorite tactic was to rush his explosives specialist Talia Aponi as far as he could and chuck her TNT at me while my Reich squad was still bunched around those stairs.

In a five on five, parity is huge. After the boy’s loud welcome present, I often started those matches with a fatality or hobbling injuries, ready to be swarmed and polished off by Officer John MacNeal and his crew. I think he crippled me our first three games in a row with this no-nonsense tactic. 

But I spent some more time reading about the German kit and made sure that the Obscura Korps commander, the occult-powered but physically frail Hermann Von Heizinger, always brought along his Hermetica Occulta, a magical text that makes Union soldiers win a mental duel with Heizinger before they can enter any path he’s on. They usually didn’t, which gave Heizinger’s team a lot of protection and maneuvering room. I started to close the gap between myself and this aggressive youngster.

Not long after that we had a game where I used Heizinger’s psychic buffer to corner, walk down and eliminate the Union squad one by one with the team’s close-combat specialists. A lot of successful d10s were flying. I had four figures to Zeke’s one: the heavy weapons specialist, Barry. 

He backed Barry into a corner and made me come to him, keeping himself alive just long enough with his one med kit. He vaporized my team one by one with his heavy flash gun as they darted in and out, trying to roll the killing blow. The boy even made up a theme song for Barry, which he sang as he merrily downed my team. I lost it that morning. I remember screaming “This is bullshit!” and storming down the hall. I’d forgotten that games chosen by your inner 12-year-old will be processed by that same being.

But the detail and tactical richness of Tannhaüser — especially once I got a couple mercenary figures and the Operation Novgorod set — went largely unexplored. When the kid got his first car his junior year, he became a notional resident of the house and our older pals had gelled around other titles.

I keep the game still. For one, I need to photograph it again. Second, it’s just too beautiful an artifact to let go. I have no hopes of playing it again, but it’s one of the memories that I want to have physical form. Sometimes a game box is an autotelic window into a kingdom all its own, inhabiting the same display case as that perfect song that came up late one night whose perfection and wholeness in the moment would never bear translation.

A game box is memory, but it’s also a an artifact of vague possibility that sustains in a quiet way even if you know all those fighters won’t tangle again. So Tannhaüser travels with me for the next convulsion of my life. It’s still unique among all games I’ve played for providing a pocket universe that was not only a chaotic tactical dojo, but a feed of indelible high-production B-movie action climaxes, with all their pleasantly mediated desperation, electrifying turns, and rib-shaking mishaps.

Tannhaüser Firsts

• First detailed squad skirmish game
• First total adult meltdown because of dice
• First “alternate history” game
• First miniatures game we loved

Next: Chaos in the Old World

Matt Thrower Christens His Copy of Twilight Imperium

TI was the second big FFG classic Matt got into. He tells a story that can only come from a tabletopper’s pre-fatherhood days.

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Win my giveaway pile of indie tabletop charmers. Details in Episode 110. Listen here.

You’ve got until the end of March 2026 to enter: Win indie tabletop artifacts from Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games, The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, and Ada Press.

This Three-Song Run from The Herbaliser’s 2006 FabricLive Set is Why I Get Up Every Morning

My conversation with Josh Buergel about his favorite part of a 1994 DJ Q-Bert mix had me on a hunt for more, except something more focused on a blend that used large slabs of the song and had less emphasis on turntable work.

The answer came in the form of The Herbaliser’s FabricLive.26 set. I’ve played my favorite sections almost daily, and it gets run end to end about once a week. I like the personality of the selections. I liked learning about more UK MCs I never paid attention to and had to look up. And I really like the three-cut run where they mix “I.D.S.T.” by a lad named Cappo into “Spin it Round” by the Nextmen feat. Dynamite MC right into a Jackson 5 cut.

This three-song run starts about right here and is my gravitational center of the mix, satisfying my appetite for meaty beats and playful aggression in a fresh way.

What I usually do every night around 9:30 is cue the mix right to the point where Cappo asserts himself over the thudding metallic snare of I.D.S.T.

The Herbaliser then slides the fader into a full party with the Nextmen’s “Spin it Round.” You are permitted to jump around and bump into your friends in a smoky room now. I can never stay on the couch once that stupid two-note bass kicks in.

But before you know it, they’re lightening the mood with the Jackson 5’s “It’s Great to Be Here.” This is typical of the set’s frolicsome nature, offering a throwback and a cool-down while carrying the rollicking, pub-hopping Nextmen energy forward by going backward through the crates:

There are many tasty clusters, little mini-sets, across this mix. With its inclusion of soul and funk classics blending into clever UK boom-bap and U.S. underground, it fills a very particular need for me right now.

It feels like your friends took over a club and are playing a set just for you. It feels like I was taking a new journey with one foot in the semi-familiar, feeling stuck here in my living room by this season of my life and needing something different, but not jarringly different.

This was just what I needed. Thanks for the set, lads.

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Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience

Crate Digging: January 2026

8 of Breakup Gaming Society’s Current Favorite Internet Things

🎲 I'M NOT LEARNING TO PLAY MAGICAL GATHERING was an entry from a 2024 Tumblr contest that countered NaNoWriMo with the invitation to craft an RPG in 200 words or fewer. Turning M:TG into a debate battle still feels fresh to me: “After each ATTACK, the other players may each DEFEND (spend 30 seconds explaining why the ATTACKING player is wrong).”

✍ Among Cats and Books’ Map of the the TTRPG Blogosphere I’ve got an RSS reader that tells me the coals of the blogosphere never went out, but ACaB’s data-digging turns it into visual magic. I feel both godlike and neighborly seeing this abstraction, like being a kid who peeks through a fence at a carnival suddenly getting to see the carnival from a satellite.

📚 Tabletop Bookshelf plans to achieve physical manifestation this spring in Milwaukee: “…combining our curated bookstore with a gaming lounge, gift shop, and provisions area. Our physical space will offer gaming tables for rent, online order pickup, and a welcoming community hub for tabletop gaming enthusiasts—all while maintaining our commitment to celebrating indie and solo TTRPGs through exceptional, bespoke service.”

🎲 Rucksack looks so good and feels so approachable, I sometimes wonder why David David’s work under his Grumpy Spider imprint doesn’t share shelf space at Target or something. Breakup Gaming Society now has a copy of this, which reminds us of our time with lighthearted improv and wool-pulling games like Snake Oil and Balderdash.

🎙️ Shelf Stable Kenny Katayama and Tom Bowers keep the hobby’s near-past memory tissue supple and moist with surveys of enduring board games that shouldn’t go down the memory hole. I bet you’re gonna about hear something you meant to buy in 2019 and go back and buy it.

🎲 Pyrotechnics, which was reviewed favorably in prototype form last summer on Breakup Gaming Society, is now not only polished and real and ready to play, it’s also been implemented on Board Game Arena. Grab a pal and have a 10-minute fireworks contest, this little display is tight and bright.

🎟️ Indie Board Game Showcase 2026 is hitting Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Denver from Feb.-March. Use the code BREAKUP to get 50% off your ticket. Get your ass out of the house and watch an indie designer beam as you stroll to their table, craft brew in hand, to try the game they made. Top-tier human feeling.

📰 W. Eric Martin’s Boardgame Beat launches Jan. 26 and will be the new home of this former BoardGameGeek industry reporting legend. He’s still building out the site, hence the Greek text, but this will be a bright dial on the Breakup Gaming Society media dashboard when it goes live.

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Get my foolproof system for learning complex Euros in as little as 10 weeks.

Get my foolproof system for learning complex Euros in as little as 10 weeks.

How to Learn Complex Board Games When You’re Depressed (SETI First Play Report)

This is adapted from the script of Episode 108, “SETI First Play + Arkham Horror Retrospective.”

When I launched my first probe in SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, it felt like my soul leaving the gravitic well of paralytic depression. That game's been set up since November and was untouched until last weekend.

The anhedonic sensations had me bound so tight, I found myself wondering if I hadn’t lost the love of play entirely. Usually a good thing to do when you get bogged down learning a monster game is to break out a good groove game that’s still challenging but that you know well enough to run smoothly. That woulda been Resist! But I couldn’t even bring myself to set up the cards for that.

My ludic nerve system was inert.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Look at all the “space dust” on that board, this is super realistic

So it’s exciting when you stop feeling like a piece of shit and get yourself together like DiCaprio did in The Aviator and appear, shockingly clean, in front of your gaping engineering team with a gleam in your eye: “People. We’re gonna launch a probe and find ourselves some of those OmNomNom fellers out there in those milky stars.”

How do you learn games?

How much does your general state or life circumstances impact how and when you play?

These factors always come to the fore when I’m reflecting on what I think about a game, so I’m giving you two things:

• A journal of my step-by-step guide for learning complex games

• My notes on my first-ever solo play of SETI

Field Guide to Learning Heavy Euros While Being Morbidly Depressed in a Collapsing Economy in a Country With Fake Institutions That Fall Over in Three Seconds if Given a Hard Nudge by a Few Tech CEOs and an Opportunistic Rapist With a TV Fan Base:

Step 1: The box lands in the driveway. Feel the heft of that box. Holy moly, it’s a two-hander! Curl it every morning, for three to four days. Three sets of 10.

Step 2: Once you’re yoked, pop the cardboard. Then get so paranoid that you’re going to lose a piece, keep all the cardboard sproules in a big pile on your floor, which you slip on one night while heading into the spare room.

Realize the following morning that you missed your chance at the most hilarious country bachelor death of all time. Hold each sproule up to the light to make sure no unpunched pieces are in there, stack and sort the pieces and do a count. Now we know what things are called and that we have enough of them.

Step 3: For the next several weeks, turn on the work light after dinner and walk to the edge of the table where sits your expectant star-combing enterprise. Pick up the rulebook and sigh.

Feel the edges of your soul, this winter-hardened obsidian stranger scraping against your ribs as it rotates, maddeningly slow. Decide to ride out the mid-evening hours instead by getting into bed and reading Letters of the Century, America 1900-1999, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler.

Oooh, here’s one. Turns out Clyde Barrow, the famous male half of Bonnie and Clyde, appreciated their getaway car so much that he personally wrote Henry Ford:

Tulsa Okla
10th April, 1934

Dear Sir:

While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other skinned, and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt enything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.

Yours truly,
Clyde Champion Barrow

Step 4: Ride out Christmas and New Years’ listening to jazz in a darkened room.

Step 5: What’s that ticklish feeling? It’s like somewhere, cut off from everyone and the tinny signals of the holidays, I felt the earth turn, and my heart with it, there in the dark with some personally crafted Bethlehem star glowing in the deeps of Roland Kirk’s saxophone.

I’m suddenly desperate to get a client job done on a Friday so I can wake up Saturday with work that can take as much time as it wants. Time uncrimped at either end. No chores. Light meals only. No shopping. The weekend and my mind are clear. By Sunday afternoon I’ve logged my first play.

If you follow my patented system, you, too, can get your first play of a heavy solo game done in under 90 days. [Insert call to action for expensive online course here.]

Attaboy, get that rulebook out and work this thing

Now that we’ve covered how to learn games, here are my notes on my first-ever playthrough of SETI, a game where you race to build the capabilities of an agency that’s trying to locate and make contact with alien species before any of the other jerk agencies.

 1. I played the game on the easiest solo setting, which uses an automa to simulate another player getting stuff done across the table from you. More on that mode later.

2. I found the rulebook extremely solid. I just started choosing major actions that would take me across as much of the board as I could. Plenty of reading and double-checking, but the rules for each action are well-written and the illustrated examples are helpful.

The main action menu is pretty straightforward: It centers around the tension between building out your capabilities in data gathering and handling, improving your cash/card flow, or actually getting a probe somewhere. The major source of head scratching will stem from the fact that one of the actions is playing one of the multi-use cards in your hand for its printed effect, which can override or alter the basic actions.

There there are nearly 200 damned multi-use action cards that will have you re-reading their effects because you’re not sure how the particular card effects trigger in time with or instead of the base rules. You will not be alone. Here is an excellent FAQ from the publisher for you English speakers. I was a frequent visitor to the rules forum on BoardGameGeek, where I saw the trails of other confused people who had drifted around the same subtle interpretive stuff I did.

3. Maybe this was rookie incompetence, but I was expecting money and energy tokens to be the worst chokepoint for getting things done. Cash, energy, and publicity status are the three things you spend to get stuff online and working. I had plenty of all three by the third of the game’s five rounds. What I didn’t have was enough of the major actions like launching probes or upgrading the tech stack, because you can only do one of those on a turn. 

4. I liked seeing how the accretion of little actions started to push this game’s broad and varied ecosystem of scoring options to the game’s central gimmick: Actually making contact with an alien species.

It didn’t happen until the last turn, but the furtive Oumuamua race poked their head out from behind an asteroid just before the final curtain. This might sound like a strange comparison, but the alien reveal reminded me of the one time I played Betrayal at the House on the Hill, which I did not enjoy years ago in part because having to set up a finale minigame shattered what little interest I already had in playing Betrayal in the first place.

I read a criticism somewhere that stopping SETI to adjust for the new conditions of alien contact can similarly dampen the game’s flow. It certainly stalled me on my first try; I told the Oumuamua that there were sandwiches in the fridge and to knock themselves out, I was going to bed.

5. The fact that the progress markers on the game went so slowly was likely due to a mix of incompetence and still missing some basic rules. Next time I’ve gotta make sure that the automa was notching progress correctly.

6. Basic story of my first game:

• I overinvested in computers, then got itchy to get something off the ground, launched a probe and pushed it all over the place, eventually landing it on Uranus for some pretty nice rewards. I’m not even gonna make the joke, I did not fly to that planet to make the joke, make it quietly on your own time.

• But back to the major action bottleneck: Launching a probe is a major action, committing it to orbit is a major action, landing on a planet is a major action. That’s three turns out of five where that was the focus of everything I was doing. I think I’m gonna have to get a lot better at using the free actions to accelerate things. But right now, I’m in my favorite part of the journey: learning and exploring and seeing how things fit together. Optimization is a problem for a future version of my space agency.

• The automa didn’t do much of note except to be wildly successful at pinging various sectors with radiotelescopes and raking in tons of data from them. The basic difficulty setting seems designed a lot like the tutorial or training module of a video game: a low-stakes white room where you can poke around and learn some moves. Even with the rules I doubtlessly got wrong, it seemed very forgiving. I was easily outpacing the bot on the scoring track by midgame. But in the future, I’ll have five more difficulty levels to pick from, and they get harder because these modes layer on a bunch of annoying mini-objectives you have to hit every turn, with the automa scoring extra points for the ones you can’t hit. I’m probably going to do one more full play on super-easy mode to cement the rules before I see what life’s like with a better opponent.

Main Takeaway: While finally walking the ins and outs of the actions delivered several puffs of jubilation throughout the day, there were no big surprises. I’ve been tracking the chatter for a year, and SETI is just what I expected in service of breaking my 2025 war/historical game diet: Lush, sprawling, detailed, well-built, a galaxy’s worth of potential decisions squeezed into a few windows of opportunity. I think the baseline for Euro game design in general is high enough that you’re not going to put out a game with this much cardboard that’s bad.

So thanks for bearing with me as I finally worked up the focus. I’m going to report back when I have more plays under my Orion’s Belt. Right now the sheer busy-ness of this game feels like it’s running neck-and-neck with its promise, but I’ve turned this corner enough times to know that the second, third and fourth games will run way faster.

Mapping the black expanse of my winter soul has shrunk it with familiarity. It has more well-defined edges now — much like stubbornly launching probe after probe will compress the initial bewilderment of SETI in good time.

But I’m enjoying the journey so far. I like SETI. But I knew I’d like it. By February I’ll know if I love it.

Stay tuned for further reports.

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

Mic Test: A 1967 Letter About My Dad from a Frustrated Commander

I just got a new mic and am still tweaking recording settings and device placement. The irony of trying to tweak audio equipment while reading a letter about why my Dad washed out as an electronics officer on a destroyer is not lost on me. This is the letter from his commanding officer, complete with all headings and administrative codes.

Further Dad-Related Content: I taught him Splendor the last time I ever saw him and he sandbagged me.

Classic Hip Hop Sample Chasing: Original Flavor Back to Roland Kirk

I first heard the instrumental for Original Flavor’s “Can I Get Open?” on Cut Chemist meets Shortkut - Live at the Future Primitive Sound Session. Two gifted cats with great ears absolutely destroying it on four turntables at a live show in The Bay.

“Can I Get Open?” released in 1994 and augured the ascendance of Roc-A-Fella. Jay-Z is on this track. Dame Dash also shows up later in the album. And group member and producer Ski headed right to Roc-A-Fella when Original Flavor disbanded.

But Jay-Z is the least interesting thing about this cut: I’m in love with the instrumental and its component sources. I found it on YouTube and play it more than the vocal version.

But as vocals go, I still love how it carries the energy of the era. One of my favorite features of the New York stuff from ’91 to about ’94 was the hyperactive crew rhyming typified by the famous “Scenario” track with A Tribe Called Quest and Leaders of the New School. I never tire of the playfulness and variety of the multi-mic counterpunches to the ends of a line: Ooohs, aaaahs, whoofs, and WHATs. 

These verses were also a kind of sampling, too. You never knew when somebody was going to jam a piece of a ‘70s cartoon theme show or a commercial in the middle of a verse. In “Can I Get Open?”, you get references to Jaws and the Wizard of Oz included with the price of admission. (“Duh-nuh, duh-nuh, get out the water!”)

I had to look it up to spot it, but this track actually has a piece of mega-composer John Williams’ Jaws theme providing some of the bottom end. It also has a plucked-instrument melody — is it an upright bass or something else? I had to know where this one came from. It turned out to be the prelude to Roland Kirk’s 1969 album, Left & Right.

And this was how the broader magic of the solstice found me through the side door. Christmas commercials and nativity mangers are always trying to tell you what you should feel this time of year, but somewhere in the course of listening to this album, an expansive holiday joy found me — the kind you miss if you’re trying to shop or embarrassing yourself at the office holiday party.

Earlier in the evening I’d broken my three days of isolation to tip one with Donovan down at the Trinidad Lounge, where I caught up with him and had my first-ever taste of Malort. (ProTip: Try a nip of this Chicago staple back to back with a sip of a forgiving bourbon. Like the Tin Cup I had. It works.)

Donovan came back to the shack for a bit and I coached him through his first game of Resist!, or tried to: I forgot how quickly he gets a game when you set it in front of him. He charged his way to a win and down the dirt road he went in his Subaru, leaving me with a slight buzz and an overwhelming desire to chill out with one of my favorite instrumentals, which led to me, content and alone in the darkened living room, listening to the entirety of the LP that birthed the sample. 

All of it. The guy seemed to have an instrument for every facet of his kaleidoscopic soul. The second track, “Expansions,” clocked in at over 19 minutes and I held on for the whole ride, wondering if God took this man’s vision away at age two so he could show you what sunlight on the trees looks like in a valley where clamorous parades of the dispossessed honk and wail all their suffering and joy like the culminating scene in some magical realist epic.

I’d never heard anything quite so alive. Listened to the rest of the album and woke up in the morning wondering if the divine keeper of the playlist hadn’t sent me my own Saxophone Jesus.

Go look at what I’m talking about and tell me you don’t feel something: His ability to do circular breathing and play multiple horns is sort of the hook that gets you to watch, but underneath is a composer’s mind that seems to take in every sense, every style of American music, every emotion, everything that channels wind from the lungs, and push it back out in something that sounds both acutely envisioned and totally serendipitous.

As a parting gift, here he is with his quintet in Bologna in 1973. Happy holidays, fellow explorers and lost-ark raiders.

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Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience

Dwelling Solo RPG Session 6: The Triple Dungeon Feature

This is the Basement scene generated from the prompts on pages 44-45 of Dwelling, a solo journaling RPG about facing spirits and memories in a haunted house. Listen to what happened in the previous room here.

BASEMENT

The Remember prompt in the basement sees the narrator flash back to his most self-destructive nights — and the last time he ever sees AB, who has haunted the narrator in previous rooms.

Remember

I chanced across her one last time in the waning days of the crew.

Rick and I had started off at The Divine Antler, hitting it pretty hard. Some little hustler from Nebraska had gone to the bathroom with most of a gram and handed Rick back a baggie with almost nothing in it then just walked off like she was dropping the car keys at the valet.

“You’re welcome, help your fuckin’ self!” Rick shouted after her. “That’s the second time she’s done that shit.”

We only had a couple key bumps left by the time we got to RiNo and went down the steps into the party at the garden-level condo. I guess you can’t sell it at markup if you call it a basement.

I didn’t like showing up light to find Sig. Sig never mentioned blow, never bought it, never asked for it, was always gleaming on a crest of it, would do any amount you’d put in front of her for any amount of time. 

I was her boyfriend, so it was my job to keep those copper eyes flashing with the right fuel mix. The deal was I kept her high so I could show her off. I kept me high so I wouldn’t think too much about the deal. 

But I felt wrong-footed. Rick was unflappable, I don’t know how he managed to go even harder than I did and never act like a shorted-out wire. One of the reasons I liked abusing drugs with Rick was because I felt like he fit with me in that overlap between the hardcores who had nothing going on except those parties and the people, us, who could get torn up and still keep our white-collar jobs even if it meant washing our faces at 7 a.m. on no sleep and going right under the fluorescents for nine hours with our skin peeled off.

We spotted Sig and threaded through to her. I clasped her around her waist and passed off the ravaged little baggie. She had the pro party reflex, scooped it without moving her eyes off of me or looking down. 

I kissed her neck and she purred and I lingered there so everybody could see me do it. Even some of my friends, too loose, too late at night, would look at her and say some extremely out-of-pocket shit like I wasn’t standing there. Letting all that slide was part of yet another tacit contract that required everybody to be off their faces about half the week.

“I was just trying to tell them about what you said on the phone the other night…” I swear that at some point she’d trained her blink reflex to go at 1/3 normal human speed. “Them” was a group of three dudes, six of whom I think were DJs. “…about when you were in that meeting?”

“‘Like farting in an empty coliseum…’” They loved it. She had ways of showing me off, some kind of glamor-for-vocab trade, I guess. I told the story of the meeting, then started telling it again. The Party Sphinx was in the circle too, just listening and looking amused in a lazy, intelligent kind of way. He always looked innocuous and wholesome in his blazer and jeans, thin hair swept back. Rick told me once about what went on at his house and it was almost enough to make me rethink my whole shit at the time.

“OK, I just hit up my guy, except we gotta get to Lakewood,” Rick leaned in to tell me.

“Lakewood?” Fuck, my whole chest crashed. “Cory’s here, we talk to him?”

“Let’s be real, Jayce,” he said, squeezing my shoulder in a brotherly way. “You gotta catch him before he goes on tilt, look at him.” I couldn’t argue. He was over against a wall, mouth moving to start one word that never came out, just pawing at his girl.

“I’m too fucked up. You’re too fucked up.” This was a bit of theater. Rick was never too fucked up to get his tan SUV to the connect. Supernal powers parted the seas for that craft. 

Sig had drifted away, but I could track her by her loud and vacant laugh. My eyes locked on to a group of three girls near a couch. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Which one?” Rick was already tracking my eyes.

“The little Asian brunette with the glasses.” I said, looking at the ground so I wasn’t gaping. “Ricker, that’s her. That’s fucking her. What kind of planet am I on here…”

“That’s the girl you always talk about? Goddamn dude, that’s nice. You must have been pretty handsome back then.”

I looked back up. She was smiling at me, dimpling and shining, motioning me over. Come sit by me. She stood to hug me and I wrapped all of her and seized because I had a wheelbarrow full of hurt and wonder to dump out and inspect together, but that wasn’t her way. 

She was on one of her optimistic upswings and none of that mattered. It had never even happened. She was back in an undergrad program and out with some fellow students on the couch whose faces I couldn’t see. Rick drifted over and we all talked and before long, AB made it simple: She’d drive us.

AB would sometimes talk about hurting herself and sometimes she’d do it before she’d molt again. Part of the new skin was often a cute late-model Japanese compact, which she’d keep spotless in and out.

Rick was being diplomatic in the back seat and chatting her up because it looked like everybody was getting what they wanted. She had that sun in her voice. I’d caught her in the sweet spot of a reemergence.

Having her at the wheel, the city looked bright and safe again. She dressed and drove carefully, telling us about her semester in Oaxaca, magnetic in her delight. She talked about living there someday and I knew that was unlikely, but didn’t want to be left behind, either.

I was going through her zip CD case, looking for something I knew because I was a DJ, too, just the kind that liked to lord it over small, captive groups on an impromptu basis.

She pulled us into a big gas station by Auraria Campus, dovetailing in with a surge of people in mint Avalanche jerseys.

“See?” She took my arm in the parking lot and gently and pointed to a glass box on the edge of campus. “That’s where I go for my history classes and that little weird street there, that goes down to the student center…”

“There?”

“No! By that tower…”

“There?” I trailed my hand around aimlessly at the sodium vapor ceiling of the town.

“Noooo, silly, c’mon…” she laughed and scrunched her smooth face until she had me pointed in the direction of a campus food court and told me about the three places she liked best. Rick got out and drifted to the edge of the parking lot with his phone and a smoke.

AB needed gas. And money for gas, $100. I went to the ATM and pulled out $200 on a cash advance and gave her half. She bought an immense sheaf of scratch tickets and did a small prepay for Pump 4 with whatever was left. I had enough left for the general defense fund plus the baggie, so I didn’t linger on it.

Arjun strolled back over to meet us at the car. “OK, we’re headed to a place out on Mississippi.”

AB piloted us to a strip mall as directed by Rick. The mall and its pokey businesses were dark except for a locals’ basement bar in its anchor property. Rick got out to go find his guy. AB’s cute little car was wedged in between two larger ones at the darker end of the lot, a screen of scraggly juniper bushes in front.

“Will you hold my hand?” The request was cheery. I did and she kissed me once in between updates on her little sister.

Rick was several minutes gone, so she asked me to take her to the corner for a drink. Def Leppard was on the speakers and there was a booth just for us and the crowd felt like somebody’s holiday living room post-big meal.

She sipped on a 7&7 and did her scratch tickets. I attacked a Guinness and a Jaeger and then another Guinness and a Jaeger and asked her why she reappeared tonight, still trying to dump the wheelbarrow, wasn’t this like we just resumed a life where we could hang out and not worry about being cool, every time she showed up it’s like there was this pocket of happiness.

A text came in from Sig: WHERE DID U GO

“Hold on,” she stopped tearing through the tickets to put her chin up in the air, her face calm and intent as she grabbed a bar napkin and mopped off my upper lip. “All better!”

“You know what’s crazy do you know the one thing that stopped us from getting back together in ’96…”

PHONE: ?

“…and you called like nothing had happened and I remember I asked you ‘Why?’ when you said you wanted to come over, that was after I almost lost my job because I couldn’t get off the couch…”

PHONE: ???

“…and I caught fire, you just said so matter-of-fact, ‘I want to come over and do you,’ and I just went all to pieces and the pieces caught on fire and I knew I had to save myself and there was only one thing I could do because I had to defend myself and not let you back in, I was so torn up…I took the cordless into the bathroom, I halfway there just hearing your voice…”

PHONE: TEXT ME BACK

“…somehow in between I got myself off while you were trying to talk me into a visit, I still remember the sound on the tile, we had that octagonal black-and-white tile and I the second I, like, heard that splat I knew I was in the clear and that’s when I had the strength to say ‘no.’”

“That’s some incredible game you have there, Jayce.” I hadn’t noticed Rick standing right by the booth.

PHONE: were going

AB’s mouth went round and her face shot through with delight: “I won $300!”

We did some rails in AB’s car and headed back for the other basement. Rick told me his connect brought his four-year-old kid with him in the car. 

If you ever want to quickly square the difference between having your heartbreak in the room and wanting to show off the old heartbreak to the next heartbreak, my advice is to just be extremely high.

We talked the whole way back downtown. Rick interviewed us about everything that had happened since high school.

AB got us back to RiNo easily, but there was no parking; the party had doubled or tripled in size. Rick tried to navigate her onto a corner of dirt right in front of a stop sign.

“I’m not driving up over a curb, you’re crazy.”

“Just pretend you’re at a concert or a big festival, you get wiggle room in this situation,” Rick advised.

“Naw, we’re not wiggling like that.” She got us on a proper curb five blocks away, chin up and focused.

It was all coming together. I somehow had them both, the chic set and my suburban girl. After our stroll I introduced AB to several people and promised everybody too much and told them too much. It was time to loop Sig in on this perfectly congruous social network I had in my head.

AB and Rick stayed outside and I swept through the inside. The high hat from the house music drilled right through my ear and wobbled my confidence. I crammed sideways through the room once, twice, found one of the remaining DJs. 

Sig had left with the Party Sphinx, he said. Rick left with the last of our buy. I left with AB. We walked the five blocks back to her car and started the long ride out to Aurora.

Her little sister and her fiancé were asleep on a couch in front of a massive TV showing the DVD selection menu for Lord of the Rings. They woke up and joshed with us just the same as if we’d wandered in on a Saturday afternoon 15 years ago. It was like a painting waving back at you; my intake of yayo was out of balance with the alcohol intake. I needed the sedative of her skin.

AB took me through the kitchen and down to her basement. Sometimes back in the day I’d get hints about the other ABs in that cuddly frame. She asked me if I wanted to see the video she made of her playing with herself earlier that day. I didn’t, but I tried when she offered to lay back in the laundry all over her bed — that detail was also new to me and even more shocking somehow — and just give me all the things I was too shy to ask for in my teens and twenties.

I couldn’t take them. The emotions and arousal were extreme. The hardware was uncooperative and dawn came and I had to burn out what was left of my throat smoking and trying look normal in their front yard while my cab came, and that was another $52 on the card.

My private bowl of the city night turned the color of an institutional band shell. I composed the first of 22 texts I’d send Sig that morning.

I didn’t hear from her for 72 hours.

Next: The Basement Conjuring

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Check the Donate page. It’s fun.

Ryuutama TTRPG: A Song to Chase Away Our December Gloom

With so much bleak subject matter in recent featured games in this interview series, Walt and The Great Unclean One take an intermission with Kotodama Heavy Industries’ Ryuutama RPG, an Ennie Award-winner that focuses on the travails of wandering bards in the Japanese countryside.

It’s as wholesome as homemade broth, full of rascally adventures, and girded by formal shared storytelling mechanics that remind us that the journey’s the thing.

Hit play below and get Walt’s tour of this gentle and inventive confection.

Crate Digging: December 2025 (Stocking Stuffer Remix)

4 Small Creator Finds from Folks in My Network

👕 Doghouse Reilly Thanks to our clever friend Tim — who sets rap lyrics on tees with simple, striking type solutions — one of Breakup Gaming Society’s favorite Guru lines from the immortal “DWYCK” track featuring Nice & Smooth is now on a T-shirt that you can order and wear. (Check out the rest of the Doghouse offerings, including his Lego treatments of Run the Jewels iconography.)

🎲 Resilience Daybreak was probably the biggest recent title that let players confront real problems with fist full of agency. Greg Loring-Albright brings that proposition down to the street level, to your friends, even your refrigerator, to get his point across in playable and teachable moments. His Resilience print-and-play lets 2-4 players team up and place dice to prep a neighborhood for crisis.

🎲 Twisted Trumpets A tile-laying design debut from Matt Rodela, who used to gig as a trumpeter. Here you’ll be competing to build a fanciful labyrinthine instrument in response to the oft-changing whimsy of a royal family. Can you bend that brass to fit royal specs, both public and personal goals, and even accommodate birds nesting in the instrument?

🎲 TerraClash The boys behind this one reached out to me about this Kickstarter effort; they’re promising a roguelite deckbuilder and dicechucker that runs co-op, solo, or in full backstab mode for up to six players. Oh, and you can go long campaign if you like the action and want that persistent RPG feel with one of eight characters. Looks like they’re banking on brisk action and boundless replayability here.

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Hear Fox in the Forest designer Josh Buergel curate trick-takers and Q-Bert tracks.

Hear Fox in the Forest designer Josh Buergel curate trick-takers and Q-Bert tracks.

Goodbye, Old Friends: The Board Game Cull à la Dunkirk

I will go to extreme lengths to avoid administrative burdens. I despise running the machinery of what most people think of as normal activities. If I even hear conversations about it, I’ll make an excuse to go home.

Problem: Estate Planning
For a time I did contract writing for a company in the retirement planning space. Some of the estate planning stuff got stuck in my head. I’m 56, after all. It’s foolish not to think about it. But what’s with all the forms and lawyers? I need to think and write and sell my house and find new income. I’m not taking on any new projects where my conversation with the universe is refereed by the state. I have to make a bunch of dramatic pivots and that means moving light and fast. I had to do a field amputation on a bunch of games and a past that’s become a hindrance to my wellbeing.

Solution: Don’t Have Anything
The beautiful collection of designs I mostly acquired in the 2010s deserved better than to be pawed over at a thrift store. 75% of my day is looking for work and the rest is doing what little work I have; I’m not shipping jack shit 38 times.

So yesterday evening my neighbor JoJo came and packed all this into his car:

Weep later. Move it now.

JoJo showed me Project L and Escape the Dark Sector, so I figured these games would have a better chance of being enjoyed in his care. He did me a service here: I don’t need to wallow in artifacts from lost friendships that ain’t coming back. Plus, as he reported, the addition of all these boxes to his apartment has made him reorganize his Godzilla figures. But if he ever breaks any of these out, he’ll realize the value of accommodating some of the early century’s best tabletop thinking.

Say Their Names
In case you’re curious, the departed are:
• Wingspan
• Formula D
• Escape: Curse of the Temple
• Small World: Underground
• Tesla vs. Edison
• Ca$h 'n Guns
• Android: Netrunner
• Seasons
• Dungeon Petz
• Castles of Mad King Ludwig
• Dead of Winter
• Spartacus and The Serpents and the Wolf Expansion Set
• King of Tokyo
• Sheriff of Nottingham
• Arkham Horror: The Card Game
• Red November
• Space Crusade: The Ultimate Encounter
• Dark Future: The Game of Highway Warriors
• Power Grid
• Snake Oil
• Patchwork Americana Edition Codenames
• Hadrian’s Wall
• The Crew: Mission Deep Sea 
• Battlelands
• Cheaty Mages
• Castle Poker
• DustRunner
• Storm Above the Reich
• Dominant Species
• 1066, Tears to Many Mothers
• New York Slice
• Mouse Cheese Cat Cucumber
• Cockroach Poker
• Coup
• Never Bring a Knife
• The Bloody Inn

What Am I Keeping?
”Why would you give away all your board games?” JoJo texted me when I showed him the pic of his prospective adoptees. I thought I was demonstrating sober, adult foresight. He heard a suicide threat.

But I’m not giving everything away. I’m keeping a small pile that are:
• Simply too beautiful or unique to give away
• Welcoming to tabletop-curious friends I may yet find
• Stuff I got in the past few years that I know I’ll want to play solo every year; they’re laden with memories of fun instead of loss, and plus I still know how to play them, unlike half the stuff in the photo

So by virtue of preparing for either a house sale and/or some weird event that suddenly kills 56-year-old men, I’ve damn near got my Concrete Island collection. (Bonus reference for you J.G. Ballard readers out there.)

In a future post, I’m going to show you what I kept and why.

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There’s no way I’m giving away Thunderbolt Apache Leader.

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?