Best Board Games for Grownups: Bounce on Your Thumb

I tried writing a regular post with some of these SEO phrases bolted on the front end and it looked so offensive that I thought maybe a top board game for adults would be bouncing up and down on your thumb.

You’d think best board games for grownups would be John Daly Irritable Bowel PGA Shootout or Settlers of Catan, but Settlers has been out of print for years and JDIBPGAS is notoriously difficult to win. Bouncing on your thumb is a party game you can’t pass up!

You’ll need:
• Yourself
• Thumb

Like UNO, it’s something you can do if you hate yourself and don’t have friends who say interesting things. I also yell when I see colors and numbers, but I’ve never needed cards for that. Believe me, you’ll look a lot smarter bouncing on your thumb.

Cool Board Games Ever for Adults: Phrases Like These Are Why the Internet Was a Mistake

The best way to do cool board games ever for adults is to remember not to spit on the pieces. I had a friend who auditioned for Wheel of Fortune once. He didn’t get to play on TV because he spit on the wheel when it stopped because he didn’t like the prize. He turned it into an allegorical novella that got picked up by an indie press and did pretty good for a while, but now he sleeps hanging upside down on one of his towel bars and shits down his own back at night.

Now it’s game night! For adults!

Here are some more board games to try if you decide your group has mastered bouncing on your thumbs:

• Hey, That’s My Cornea!

• Cascadia Board Game Review

“I have not been so transported, so riveted by a game since Thunderbolt Apache Leader over the winter. The sign’s it’s sticking? Getting it on the table for at least one play is #1 on the list when the first pourover carafe is ready. I put off meals. I’m going to repeat this for the few that know me: I put off meals to play this. Hunger is a rude interruption to what I am experiencing. I’m on that Chinook Salmon and Red-Tailed Hawk rock. The scorepad is filling up with solo games as my mind dances with the thing, susses out small tipping points and synergies in the scoring cards, learns to track the relative species, terrain balance simultaneously.”

• Slapping and Biting Deluxe Kickstarter Edition

• Mentos: The Pointmaker

• The Stupefaction of Paper Boats

• Star Wars Outer Rim Review
“It was also super annoying when, on about his third turn, he passed waypoint checks between planets that won him extra turns. It was even more annoying when he just pulled the infamous Kessel Run job—which is not easy for a starting character—and aced it. There multiple stages of skill checks for this one that require some tough rolls. I try to warn him about the odds on some of the checks he’s trying, but…with stoned gunslinger eyes, Rygar calmly says “I’m gonna crit it,” reaches for the dice, doesn’t shake them hardly at all, just picks up and chucks in one fluid motion, almost contemptuous in its off-handedness, and hits it. It was some real cowboy shit and the defining moment of the game.”

• Liquid Emoji Kingdom

• Finding a Turd While Frolicking in a Pile of Leaves

Sometimes when you look for best board games for adults, people will say Cards Against Humanity, but that game is for the kind of person who backs you into a corner at a barbecue and recites Deadpool quotes while you nod and try to fashion a noose from the cord of some nearby string lights. You’ll be climbing up on a plastic lawn chair to make it stop and they just keep saying Deadpool quotes.

People are always claiming you can “write for people and the search engines,” but that is a lie. I had to pick. I could do my voice and march doggedly toward the green beacon of my insanity or I could research the most boring possible post so I could be the third first-page search result that, despite claiming to solve a problem, starts with 500 words of anti-information before you pick up your laptop and see how far back that screen will really bend against its hinges. Sometimes it’s pretty far! People at the food court will be like, “Hey! You can’t read best strategy board games for adults inside-out!” Then you can make their face inside-out.

Best Board Game Podcasts: Bicycle Horn Sound

If you are a baby who likes sounds that last a long time, a board game design podcast is probably a good place to start. You’ll learn about:

• Worker Placement
• How to Interrogate Troubling Historical Themes in Ludic Settings
• Importance of Trimming Your Thumbnails Regularly
• How Many Points is it for a Building? Why?
• The Story of Why I Closed the Tab at 4:48 Because These Two Chuckleheads are Still Over the Moon About a Joke They Made Last Episode

Otherwise, you can listen to the hands-down best board game podcast: Breakup Gaming Society. The first 70 episodes are a Guernica of self-loathing and poorly considered riffs, but I decided to make this show the chariot in which I would take the field once more. Wrote scripts instead of trying to extemporize off bullet points. Stopped recording drunk. Improved the sound. Got rid of “other people” in the creative process because external dependencies are horseshit, you’ve got to pick something you can wake up and make with your own two hands when “other people” realize the venture involves more “trying.” I re-approached the whole thing with a little more patience and humility. But not too much, because I’m angry and I turn my best phrases when I’m swinging two-fisted against boredom, which is everywhere.

Best Board Game Podcast That You Can Listen to Right Now

• Board Games for Dinner: A lady who liked to drink tea and who would eat an entire board game, piece by piece, and review the components. She died after the third episode, but I’ve been binging those early efforts. The one where an Arkham Horror Second Edition turn marker catches sideways in her throat is memorable for both its bathos and relatability.

• Hit in the Face With a Board: It’s just a regular board game show with compartmentalized shelves and violet accent lighting, they just couldn’t think of a title. The best board game podcasts should do more to deliver on their promises of violence.

• Dork Parade: Three rosy-cheeked dinguses fight over who gets custody of the group’s four adjectives

• Roll ’n’ Write, Sounds ’n’ Lights: 32K subscribers! Maybe these people know something I don’t.

• Good Job, Boardo: This guy still thinks he can do an English accent.

Other podcasts are there aren’t any.

Well, I fell like that’s enough SEO for today.

Grease it up and bounce, board gamers!

Mysterium Board Game: I’m Not Playing This Again, Win My Copy

I’m accepting the fact that dozens of incredible titles in my spare room just won’t be played again.

I am culling, beginning with a game that I think is beautiful, well-designed and worthy, but just not for me: Mysterium, the 2015 murder mystery deduction hit.

The pieces and cards are all there. It’s been played only three times. I want it to live with somebody who loves it.

Here’s how this works:

• I’m still seeking donors who want their own copy of my beautiful and dangerous cocktail booklet. Anybody who donates in Dec. 2024 gets the booklet and is in the prize pool.

• At the end of December, one random donor will get my copy of Mysterium. I’ll mail it in Jan. 2025.

• I have to limit the Mysterium prize to donors in the U.S. lower 48, as international postage rates are breathtaking.

That’s it. Donate and get the cocktail booklet. Maybe end up with a beautiful coop deduction game in which a ghost tries — using only lush and oblique image cards — to tell a table full of psychics who was responsible for their death.

Glory to Rome: Smudge’s THC Resource Strategy Pays Off

Some of you may remember Smudge’s tale about how a college poker group devised a comeuppance for a cheapskate who liked to drink, but who didn’t have five on it.

Smudge had an extra story to tell about another group and the 2005 classic, Glory to Rome.

It went like this:

So, the first few times I played Glory to Rome, I was never sober for it. The host of an irregular game night was a gregarious fellow with an interest in high-interaction board games, and his collection of both games and friends was delightfully eccentric and rarely the same.

On this occasion, we had been casually hanging out most of the afternoon and playing various games while sipping drinks and having snacks, but around 11:30 p.m. our host brought out the Kickstarter version of Glory to Rome — along with a THC vape pen. We asked the table to make sure that everyone was OK with folks smoking during the game, and everyone was chill with it—including one of the party who preferred to remain sober, who we'll call Adam.

The game started out fine — everyone had played before, so there were no delays for rules, but the vape pen continued to make its way around the table. The game got more and more eccentric the longer it went on, both as folks built up power combinations and as everyone but Adam got stoned out of their gourds on top of tiredness from a long afternoon, laughing and getting distracted.

Adam's patience for the table was growing shorter as we crept past midnight and towards 12:30 a.m. - the rounds were taking longer and longer as he had to remind almost everyone else whose turn it was, clearly signaling that we weren’t taking the game seriously enough for him. I apologized for it profusely, with a real sense of guilt at the excellent time we were all having largely forgetting to play the game, but I was actually serious about trying to win it even though we were all completely out of it. 

Adam had what looked like a clear lead over the rest of us, but Glory to Rome is nothing if not unpredictable, and believe it or not there was a plan in the fluffy cloud passing for my brain. It was almost 1 a.m. and it looked like Adam was about to win the game on points — but on the last turn I managed to complete an instant win condition to the delight of the entire table. Except Adam.

I'm still not entirely sure whether Glory to Rome is the best game from its creator or of similar mechanics — it's chaotic, and messy, and patently unfair at times —but it will always remain wrapped in a warm, minty vapor mist of nostalgia from that night for me.

Cascadia Solo: I Thought I Was a Thrice-Ascended EcoArchitect, But I Cheated

Moments after publishing this post, I finally spotted the reason why I was able to rack up such an obscene score: I took too many turns. There are 26 animals placed here. So, regarding the text that follows: It’s all erroneous. I forge on humbled, still in pursuit of an Ascended 110+ score.

What do I do with this game now? Frame it? File it away? I’d been chasing the 110+ “Ascended” solo score ranking of Cascadia all summer, notching 100+ games regularly. A 110+ score seemed like it required a subtle extra layer of calculation I just didn’t have.

Then this. I gasped when I totaled the top half of the sheet. 93 points. I checked it again. And again:

• Bears (Card C, Families): 18
• Elk (Card B, Formations): 15
• Salmon (Card C, Families): 10
• Hawks (Card D, Territorial): 25
• Foxes (Card D, Dynamic Duos): 25

I didn’t realize I’d hit the Bear Families bonus until my next to last move, but I had focused on building diverse axes of animals that I could bookend with Territorial hawk pairs. In the back half of the game, owing to the vagaries of the draw, I did something else I usually don’t do: Went for a third pair of foxes, which turned out to be massive.

Add 40 points of terrain/nature token leftovers and I think that’s 133 — 20+ points in excess of any of my best-ever games up to that point and a mark I don’t imagine I’ll hit ever again. So I quadruple-checked the score. Took a pic, swept my eyes around the room to note the jarring gulf between what just happened on this table and the oblivion of the remaining day, then packed it up.

What a morning. What a game.

D&D One-Room Sessions: The Unstoppable Depredations of Darkroast McFanticide

Hurricane 75 doesn’t even have a character ready and is burning daylight hmmming and umming through his decades-old knowledge of D&D character classes, so I make him an Assistant Crew Leader.

His character’s task? Track down Darkroast McFanticide, the hulking, rust-armored Butcher of Hasbronia.

The room: Long and rectangular, a dais or something at the far end that, for some reason, displays a single flask that has the character’s picture on it.

He announces that he’s going to break the flask, but we’re not doing any of that because the knives are starting: “More knives than you’ve ever seen in your life.”

First plot point: Determine how many of the initial volley of flying knives hit the Assistant Crew Leader. It’s something like eight.

“This seems pretty bad,” I tell him.

“Well, it doesn’t seem like I get to do much. It’s been all you so far.”

“Bro, do you even like D&D.”

I roll a quick grapple/surprise check for him, which he fails. Darkroast McFanticide has embraced him from behind in an adamantine grip and a wave of necrotic gum tissue odor. Darkroast is upset because not enough of the knives are going into the Assistant Crew Leader’s mouth, so I tell Hurricane 75 that Darkroast stretches his character’s mouth out so more knives go inside his mouth. He gets a three.

At this point, Hurricane 75 is starting to check out on the whole experience, but I tell him he’s doing fine because we still have to do the eye check. Darkroast now wants more of the nonstop flying knives from the far wall to go into the character’s eyes.

“He’s stretching my eyes out,” he says glumly.

“Yeah. Let’s do a d6 to see how many knives go in your eyes.” It’s a six.

“Great.”

“I made an eye hit placement chart. Do you want to figure out where the first knife hits.”

“Sure.”

Oof. Right in the lacrimal caruncle. Rough. I plot out the remaining five eye hits for him so he can learn more about eyes.

There’s one piece of detailing at the end that finally engages him: Rolling a d20 to see for how many minutes Darkroast McFanticide holds the Assistant Crew Leader aloft, shaking him and gurgling in triumph. 12 minutes. We both collaborate to sketch out the scene, which is wet and crunchy because I’m a good DM and I like players to have fun.

Anyway, for all you DMs out there refining your worldbuilding and agonizing about plot and interesting NPCs: you’re overindulging your players. Boil the process down to the fundamentals. Wipe these sons of bitches off the map so you can play something else.

There is some post-session nitpicking from Hurricane 75 about Darkroast’s prowess because the flying knife trap did all the work, and some speculation as to whether my villain is a bitch. He sort of has a point, so I’m working on a different session: It’s an elegant skyship, where Darkroast will slowly work the player character into an approximate ball shape using just his hands. I’m going to also design an option where the character gets to say something before they’re fatally compressed.

Keep your eye on Breakup Gaming Society to see what thrilling duel erupts next; wherever Darkroast McFantide appears, fun is sure to follow.

Preview photo is a detail of the Sin Eater character from the Trench Crusade tabletop game, which is supposed to jump off on Kickstarter in Oct. 2024. It’s actually more horrifying than this post, check this out.

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, Pt. 1

I started trolling the boys again with fake medals and citations. They ran with it and it’s gotten out of hand. Somebody up the chain wants an explanation as to what the Lord Quincy Entertainment III decoration is for and why it has been awarded to a nonexistent flyer, a “Capt. Rarginalt.” They fired off a press release to some goof they went to the Academy with and now it’s all over CENTCOM.

What’s this? New intel? Surrounded? It’s good timing in one sense, but have the Pakistanis gone mad? Who let us get flanked and cut off? All of a sudden me and my impish flyers are out of the administrative spotlight and into the furnace.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Setup

It’s the ceremony, pre-dawn. Only six hours of sleep despite how I timed everything and drugged myself up. Plenty of work to do today. I don’t know about you, but a raft of tasks and nothing else isn’t a day worth living for; some have stolen moments of endorphin checking the Instagram feed, some have love and a natural way with being with others; I have a Cut-Off situation in Pakistan. Usually waking up pre-dawn sours me, but this process — setting up the conditions, composing the terrain hex pool and enemy divisions, is a trill of bright-calm-excited.

Including the imagined space where I think I can survive a Cut-Off, which I never have. The usual pattern: Commit at least one deep strike on Day 1 to blunt the persistent effect of the most annoying Support or Command battalion, let the lesser craft slow down the most aggressive frontline Assault elements…then send flurries of parrying attacks out in a panic over the next three days with increasingly split forces, degrading craft and pilots, until I’m overrun about Day 3, or I wake up one day, look at the board and just pack it up. I’m losing my appetite for grinding out an extra day, wriggling and bleeding for an ounce of maneuver room, just for honor.

And here we are again: Two battalions that accelerate battalion movement, and the first part of the puzzle: What’s the craft mix?

Not overthinking it this time. Modest-cost sluggers in quantity: Two A-10 As and two AH-64 As.  And we’re doing concentration of force. After all, the game is Thunderbolt Apache Leader, not Carnival of Esoteric Decisions (a medal I won after sending an amusing, if ineffective, mix of craft into some imbroglio in Libya; somebody had an algorithm or something that awarded you a ribbon if you wasted exactly $50M each from the Northrup Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin piles. Stand up, stupid, you hit the Imperial Bingo!)

So what if the annoying and surprisingly sophisticated Pakistani command battalions—check you out, Pakistan, I see you—can push everything at me at double speed. I’m going to fix on one thing: Making sure they have less and less stuff to push each day. Go ahead. Force march your shot-full-of-holes ragtag bullshit my way. I’m going to try to turn the Front Line and Friendly Transit zones into a buzzsaw into which they can push all the crappy particle board they want. 

Wish me luck. If this works, I could end up with a shiny Order of the Malted Milk Falcon.

My, my, aren't we frisky.

***

What have we learned since Thunderbolt Apache Leader pulled us singlehandedly from an intractable late-winter depression? I’ve now filled 14 mission sheets out since learning this game in late winter ‘24. In service of not being a monophagous slouch — the world already has enough twats who just want to hunch over one title with the same people week after week, year after year — I’ve added several new titles to my collection: Final Girl, Wingspan, Cascadia, Vale of Eternity and Star Wars Outer Rim.

But the test is this: What do I regularly crave? What am I going to reach for? Along with all these new arrivals — some of which I have played heavily — I still need TAL on the table at least once a month. What sticks is its own testament.

Missions to Date (Personal Surrender Notes Sometimes Substitute for Formal Rating)

• Pakistan, Cut-Off Outcome: Tap-out - Untenable by Day 3

• Libya, Cut-Off Outcome: Day 6 Tap-out

• North Korea, Show of Force Outcome: Dismal

• North Korea, Surge Outcome: Good*

• North Atlantic, WWIII Outcome: Failure. Overrun.

• Iran, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Are you kidding me with these attack rolls?!!

• Iraq, Show of Force Outcome: Good

• Libya, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Good

• Pakistan, Holding Action Outcome: NOPE

• Pakistan, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Poor

• Iraq, Cut-Off Outcome: Good

• Israel Defense, Cut-Off Outcome: Mission failure.

• Iraq, Rapid Deployment Outcome: Good

• Pakistan, General War Outcome: i can’t take it any more

*Even my best efforts are marred here. There are a couple things I was playing incorrectly. 1) You get ONE auxiliary pilot for every craft TYPE, not every CRAFT. I was playing with too deep a bench. 2) I thought I was being clever and economical by collapsing all the Arm Aircraft steps for the day into one umbrella move. I was cheating. It’s a separate step for each mission, I believe, so my SO expenditure was also padded. Whoopsie.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 1, Mission 1
Target: Fast Assault Battalion 
Pilot: Viper, A-10A

The enemy — none of whose vehicles have ranged attacks — obligingly clusters in key points along neat reverse-S pattern on flat ground between ridgelines, offering themselves up to at least be halved in strength with one low-altitude pass. Viper seizes this opportunity by knocking out a grand total of three points worth of vehicles, missing hilariously with every kind of armament on the craft. He tops off this gobsmacking display by getting the HUD damaged and biffing a 6+ Bingo check, accruing three Stress on homebound approach. What an asswipe. This was a weak battalion that he could have cratered and should have halved at the very least. My opening gambit is already sideways. Concentration of farce. With the exception of one late APC kill, I have a string of something like six attacks where I didn’t generate more than a natural three on the d10. That is discouraging.

Award: Medal of Defecation

***

Experimentation: In my rookie outings I anchored on the Fast ability to make the variables less dizzying. Then I ease my way into the charms of other abilities, figuring out the nifty trick of having Slow dudes enter low-altitude under heavy ridge cover, wait out the enemy’s fire step, then burst onto the scene in a breathtakingly destructive, patiently timed counter. It takes more Loiter time, but it slaps.

Experimentation: The possibility vibrates. What happens, for instance, if I requisition myself a Specter gunship and then spam a cluster of choppers? Let the Specter, with its free ammo pass and giddy lack of weight restrictions, hit the enemy deep to take out far-away divisions who think they can sit back there between three bands of friendly cushion and just fuck with me? Then we dispatch our cheapo choppers — two AH-1s and an AH-64A—in a cluster to knock out the most menacing frontline assault battalions.

It turned out pretty good because I challenged another habit: Stewing about three delicate complicated entry points onto the battle hex map. What if I just bunched them up for a cavalry charge? It was not only effective, it was devastating. Riding low and dispensing generous ladles of Hellfires for Stand-Off strikes and LAUs for close-in work, they would scour their hex, pound the next one and glide easily over the smoking bric-a-brac. Sometimes I had chopper pilots who had nothing to do on their turn except throttle forward, hoping they could at least dump a bird or two before their mates slagged everything. It was glorious.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 2, Mission 1
Target: Tank Leader Battalion
Pilot: Halo, A-10A

With Viper’s loose stool being pressure-washed out of seams in the cockpit previously thought impermeable, I give the stress-resistant Halo the nod. The Tank Leader battalion that was halved on Day 1 by yeoman work from my AH-64 operators—Rock and Eagle—has rumbled into my rear band. Halo has to mop it up post-haste. I decide we don’t have the luxury of running fewer than three missions today, as the Friendly Transit zone now has three assault battalions jostling for our necks—including the Fast Assault Battalion that so baffled Viper. The Apache duo is going after that. I repaired nothing, so hopefully that compromised engine gets the bird to the zone. I don’t even want to detail what I have asked Rebel to do. The bandsaw has to start whirring, missing teeth and all. I’m not diverting to rear-line attacks and I’m not sparing the horses.

Halo starts off with a bad break: Bad Coordinates. But he caught a good one earlier: Four HVTs are clustered in two hexes, which allows him to rip across the board in two turns and unload obscene amounts of munitions into each. He comes home with three Stress and a much lighter aircraft. There are two hellacious missions left to go before I could dare call what I see daylight.

Award: The Timely Mop-Up. It’s a watch glued to a mop I found. Just take it to your billet. Yes, I thought you would appreciate the googly eyes. What’s that? You’re going to fuck the mop. That’s fine. I’m very proud of you and you’re a very good pilot and would you please go away.

***

The brown bear that digs through my trash must be hitting some insane pre-hibernation caloric requirements. I took a full-on whiz in the remains of a Safeway rotisserie chicken, hoping to dissuade it. Every scrap was gone the following morning. I was awestruck.

I’m paralleling that path in anticipation of what I call the Awful 90: November, December, January. I’m laying in calorie-dense stores at all costs. My table will be a bonfire of crackling new endeavors. A deep black-and-red coal bed of Roman, German, American, and Russian goings-on, aiming for that March day when—probably drunk—I will realize the evening sun is stretching and stretching, hanging there like it’s stuck, and I’ve made it.

I now own GMT’s Storm Above the Reich. By Thanksgiving I hope to add Pavlov’s House and Hadrian’s Wall. When the sun starts setting at 4:43 p.m. and I feel hollowed out by 6, I hope to remember in November what I learned in March. Just take the game out. Set it up. Take Ambien and fall asleep with the rulebook on your chest. Bank the fires and grind through. Dream of bears, their stomachs full of chicken bones and piss.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Sitrep, End of Day 2

It’s been a day of valiant flying. Rebel executed a simply brilliant run, halving a full-strength infantry battalion singlehanded. He found a seam somehow, clearing two AAAs his first turn with a well-placed one-two of a Maverick and a GBU-16. His Evasive ability and ECM then kept him aloft as he plied his way west over scads of APCs and infantry with MANPADs, blessing the occupants—which included both enemy command units—with a judicious sprinkling of cluster bombs and Mk. 83s. He even somehow returned a useable craft.

It’s the kind of thing you could put your feet up and savor over a whiskey if it weren’t for the sirens and the fact that there’s no whiskey. The remains of the enemy Infantry Force and the Fast Assault battalions — along with a full-strength Air Defense Unit — have all barreled into the Friendly Rear band.

There’s one play. It’s the same play as Day 1. Lash out at the nearest antagonists with the best-placed shots you can muster. I have eight SO points, most of which I assume I’ll need to reserve for the penalties for extreme encroachment. But those infantry and assault elements are half-strength. If I go at those with two craft each, pitiable state though they may be in, I’ll knock them off for a three-SO kicker. That will keep us in it. The craft will be armed with stuff my adjutants found at Lowe’s*, but we’ll be in it, and the Pakistanis will only have two operational assault battalions left. Maybe just few enough that my tattered squad can gang up on and neutralize on Days 4 and 5. Maybe.

Award: The 7 Seconds Clenched-Fists, Black-Eyes Medal of Being Hardcore as Hell

*You have not had a true retail experience until you’ve visited the Lowe’s in Kandahar. Haggling for cart food in the front alone is worth the trip, the most fun you’ll have on this side of the Durand Line.

Rebel's in the arena. He's trying stuff.

***

Session: Cut-Off, Pakistan
Day 3, Mission 2
Target: Infantry Battalion
Pilot: Halo, A-10A

Today Warthogs and Apaches were paired off with each other for our desperate sweep of the back porch. There was much hooting on comms as we confirmed Rebel and Rock had finally crushed the Fast Assault Battalion that had been flooring it through our fire for the last 72 hours. They spotted a surviving truck or two hauling ass to comical banjo music, but those discombobulated lees will never be a coherent fighting force again. If Halo and Montana can do the same to the remnants of the Infantry Battalion, we can likely weather it when the Air Defense Unit enters our tender rear zone, regroup and make them pay on Day 4.

My gamble with Montana’s engine block craps out. He plummets into scrub and rock en route to the attack zone. Halo pushes on, his A-10 laden with with the fruits of one of the last SO points I can justify spending. He opens with a classic: busting a command unit wide open with a Maverick and simultaneously knocking out an AAA in his approach path with a GBU-16 shot. He banks back, switching to high altitude. His strike ability is compromised, but the three Mk. 20s and two Mk. 83s should be enough to hollow out the remnants of the battalion bunched across three hexes in the middle of the board. With a little luck.

There’s no more luck. He calls in the ping from the helicopter that materializes at six o’clock low. And the Sidewinder that issues from it. That’s the last we hear.

Two enemy battalions will be hammering the base by evening, with a third due to arrive before we’re reinforced. I’ll have one SO point left on Day 4 with which to send out two chewed-up craft, with pilots that are all about to go on tilt. No sense in throwing them away; we’re beat.

I think of Halo’s freshly widowed mop. For some reason that’s really getting me down.

Award: Order of the Nice Try, Cowboy

***

Day 4 of running 2-3 missions a day on Total War in Pakistan. This isn’t turning out much better than the Cut-Off debacle. I quit. This has been on the table for two or three days now and I’m just tired. The last run was my two AH-1s on a hopeless bid…I was begging for the Killed chit. 

It was a miracle even in its failure: Gator (a replacement for another KIA Cobra jockey) and Grandpa were running the gauntlet, surviving just enough damage draws not to get killed, but not enough to remain effective. HUDs were knocked out. Stress levels were spiking. Depending on the ad hoc targeting, one or the other were drawing three hits per turn as they barreled for the other edge of the map. I did a count. They were one point shy of halving the battalion…but the penalties from damage were so severe, the few birds they had left in the rack wouldn’t do anything. 

The fact that they made it home was just another in a desert full of such. I speed-ran the Close Support Old and New Testaments in two days and I didn’t even care what happened next. Please let it be the Apocalypse. Do I get to at least put my head down on the desk for 15 minutes if it’s the Apocalypse?

On the second mission, I lost the F-16 and Dart — one strike short of finishing the remains of Infantry Battalion 1A. I wasn’t worried about mortgaging my score and blowing the VPs for a new bird. It was the psychic energy and focus I didn’t have.

Each mission had the emotion of a movie. The solo flights, last-chance shots closing up and opening again with a miraculous Enemy Cover roll and then the pilot missing on the last possible try with the last possible missile. Anticipation and rage. Despair and resignation. And the overlap of unnameable alloys that should be added to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I was relieved to set it down, but still happy to savor it. Although I’m wondering if the eight-day missions just aren’t a bit protracted for me.

If you’d have told me two years ago that a solitaire boardgame about close air support would be my muse, I wouldn’t have believed you. This is a categorically unique being on my shelf, a private and exhausting and thrilling second life on my table — not exactly spiritual, but undeniably transcendent and engrossing.

I can only say to those who have made that AGM-114 strike at the last possible moment before the tanks run dry and your tailbone chakra disappears down a black flume, thank you for reading. And good hunting.

Award: It’s for you, my fellow Special Option-point spenders and pilot allocators: the  Gen. Johneld B. Dubious Patient Reader Award. I can only thank you for indulging me. I am currently lobbying BGG to get you some profile flair for this one. Should happen any day now. Count your mops before you shut down the house tonight. This century is freaky as hell.

Further Recommended Reading: Here’s Part One of my four-part series about my freshman season as a TAL commander.

Vale of Eternity, Wingspan, Cascadia: The Games of Summer

I acquire, learn and play slowly, so this doesn’t happen often: My play-pace over the last six weeks has totally outstripped my ability to makes sense of it on a microphone. Notes/initial impressions on new acquisitions here; look for a deeper dive in upcoming episodes.

The titular Eternity, a dragon who simply presides for the ‘Gram

Vale of Eternity
Buying a game with no solo mode is a major act of optimism for Breakup Gaming Society (me). I was rewarded by having something like seven different people join me for games, from hardcore M:TGers to casuals. They all loved it. One of them had his own copy the next time I saw him.

I’ve seen a few breathless reviews (unmerited) and a lot dismissal in comment threads (misguided). It’s a good game, as much for its timing in my life as anything.

See, now that’s just lovely

Wingspan
Another purchase where I went against my usual instincts in the name of game shelf biodiversity. It’s every bit as beautiful to see and touch as they say it is. I foundered in the three rulebooks and programmed instruction. I just could not picture how a turn worked. (Liz Davidson solved that. Thanks, Liz.) But I’ve got a solo game under my belt and will try it again, hopefully with others. But that’s low-priority because…

This is what the fuck I’m talking about right here

Cascadia
This game is my new girlfriend. I’ve played solo and against two other folks, each time appreciating the growing contrast between the ludicrously simply play steps and the colorful, crunchy puzzle you find yourself in about a third of the way through. (“Oh, this is nice…fuck. How do I keep the bears happy and find somewhere for this contentious hawk. Oh, my.”) Interpreting the variable scoring patterns of the animal’s five species is producing more moments of confusion than I would like, busting the flow. But I’m going to put up with that and figure it out because I woke up this morning thinking about playing this. Which I’m going to do now. Fuck blogging.

Wasteland Express Delivery Service Solo Campaign Mode: Session 3

I decided to play the Campaign Mode of this game solo. There is no formal solo mode, so I’m merely tracking how many turns it takes me to lock down three Priority First-Class Contracts. I’m playing the entire campaign as The Fallen, the salty former cultist who drives a school bus. These notes are from #3. Less Than Dead. The master narrative has resurfaced Grand Lord Emperor Torque as a character and a mission. We got intel that says he’s back and he’s a dick and he’s a cheater. Whatever. I’m going to make some money.

Writeup for #1. Welcome to the Wasteland is here. #2. Secret Mission is here.

Public Priority First Class Contracts

• Smuggler

• Blue Screen of Death

• Grand Lord Emperor Torque

Turns Elapsed: 11

Shady appears and offers to ride shotgun as my starting ally. He’s going to be handy for the first step of the “Ivory Towers” mission I draw from The Archive. He helps me buy at The Citadel for cheap and smuggle the proceeds to New Alexandria. I hang around there an extra turn to buy an extra general-purpose cargo liner and an MG. Now I’m throwing up a dust plume, crepuscular-like.

What do you mean you need “EVEN MOAR WATER,” you trying to build a log flume ride or something

I make a quick food buy and deliver it to Delos. I can’t Purchase again, so I barrel across the rutilant wastes to Corinth and pick up a mission from The Oracles of Ceres: “Free Market.” Target of opportunity: I deliver food to Silo 42 because nearby vendors were offering it cheap and Silo 42 was close. I double back to Dispatch to burn new earnings on some Vintage Hardware for the “Blue Screen of Death” requirement. The sun sets before I can ferry it to The Depot.

I drop off the Commodore 64 and also manage to fulfill the “Free Market” mission requirement at Dispatch. Shady is ousted from the sleeper cab in favor of Butch. I’ve completed 1/3 of Blue Screen of Death and 2/3 of Smuggler public Priority First-Class Contracts. I’m feeling pretty efficient.

I burn a turn buying Ammo at Dispatch because demand is nuts right now—$11 Scrap/unit—so OK. I can dump it in New New York in one move. Which I do, then parlay it right back into buying more Archaic Chips, and haul them to The Depot. “Blue Screen of Death” is 2/3 complete. 

Scanning around with the binocs after a piss break, I see that a Bonesaw Raider Truck just drifted into reach. I have an MG. The contents of his bed are fascinating: an Ammo and a Water that will trigger a crazy payday for a dual Demand marker at Delos. This would be “fuck you money,” so I give the Raider a try. It’s Section 8. My MG isn’t enough, I lose and take a damage. I try again and lose, now my Armor is clean tore off. I lose again. I decide to attack again, my rolls can’t stay this poor: I lose again, now my auxiliary General Purpose hold is shot up. Sunk cost: fuck this guy. I attack AGAIN. Never have dice been this putrid; a hit to my Sleeper Cab slays Butch.

I’m in a purple rage. The Depot is less than a move away and my bus is shot to hell. I detach a bit and go get repaired. I won’t get to take it out on Section 8, but whoever the fuck is in this Bonesaw truck is going to die next time. Next time it turns out to be Buzzsaw, who’s even tougher than Section 8. I’m in a death spiral of fixation. I lose by one shot to Buzzsaw.

The Message finally gets through: OK, I’m leaving. I disengage without further damage and go to The Citadel and pull “A Delivery,” which will complete my trio of Smuggling runs. But I still have murder in my heart for Bonesaw. I’m going to take that truck down. Fuck the turn count. At the end of the turn, I’m almost ready to pull into New Alexandria’s gates, which will notch a Priority First-Class completion. I am still SO MAD. There were SO MANY THINGS inside of Butch that are now on my upholstery.

I deliver food to New Alexandria, completing Smuggler. I hammer it straight fo the Bonesaw truck and see Zed behind the wheel. I light him up and feel hollow afterwards as I haul ass to Delos for the delivery. Big profit. Now to Dispatch to blow everything on tech and maybe a piece of ass. 

After a couple turns eating dust on the road, the third GameBoy chunk is delivered. That’s two Priority First-Class Contracts completed. I drive to The Citadel and fish for the third and decisive contract: I get “Coups Aren’t Cool,” which requires me to fulfill demand at a New Republic Army location for at least 18 $scrap. Ok. I’ll do it. I burn a turn filling my Ammo hold at The Citadel because ammo is still fetching kooky prices. I dump the single ammo crate for breathtaking margin, but I still have no clear path to an $18 trade with a NRA outpost.

I contemplate my options and cool my heels, repairing damage and installing a third cargo hold that I’ll need to deliver a water payoff to satisfy “Coups Aren’t Cool” requirements. Water? IN THIS ECONOMY? On my penultimate turn I fill my newly fitted cargo holds with three units of water for most of my cash on hand. I flog the bus back to Terminus and make a Delivery worth $18. That’s the win, kids. Thanks for nothing, Chapter 3.

Summary:  I can only imagine what could have happened with a little bit more luck across my many fruitless battles with Bonesaw Raiders. Or a little bit less pride. Either I was perverse or the dice were. In either case, it adds up to 11 ugly, amateurish turns.

Next: #4. Calm Before the Storm

Wasteland Express Delivery Service Solo Campaign Mode: Session 2

I decided to play the Campaign Mode of this game solo. There is no formal solo mode, so I’m merely tracking how many turns it takes me to lock down three Priority First-Class Contracts. I’m playing the entire campaign as The Fallen, the salty former cultist who drives a school bus. These notes are from #2. Secret Mission, in which the plotline asks the game’s truckers to take punitive action against the Raiders while helping the Archivists both prop up the world’s shaky economy and find a dangerous and pivotal item in the wastes.

Writeup for #1. Welcome to the Wasteland is here.

Public Priority First Class Contracts
• Bailout
• The Big Dig
• Kill ‘Em All

Turns Elapsed: 10

I retain The Creep as a starting ally, which means hopefully I don’t get my shields burned off just trying to get somewhere. I also select the Respect mission from The Archivists on the setup draw, as the prize will let me put a combat edge into my extra ally slot. In #1. Welcome to the Wasteland I focused entirely on trade and smuggling, but things are going to get more pugnacious this time out.

Don’t tell any of the crew back at The Depot how long I had to duel with this loser

I sink my cash on hand into an extra general storage hold and a machine gun right away at Terminus’ Mod Shop, then peel out to target a nearby Raider truck piloted by the repulsive Beanman. I close on him at high speed in a rad zone. The machine gun apparently is still in its “breaking in” period. The normally weak Beanman proves cagey; two turns invested in combat only gets all my armor riddled and useless. It’s an abominable start.

After an eternity of circling Beanman amid acrid dust, automatic weapons and insult exchanges, I finally get my new gun unjammed and sort him out—pillaging his truck for water, which is fetching high prices. The cash lets me notch an important Archivist mission after I ferry it to the thirsty buyers at Motown. Stinging from the cost of my exchanges with Beanman, I buy a rack of missiles to back up the MG. Then it’s off to refill those general cargo slots with cheap rations.

Currently I’m leaning towards fulfilling the Kill ‘Em All and Bailout public missions. I’ll fish for a third Priority First-Class Contract along the way as I don’t want to divide my energy and space messing with the expensive digger mod and extra turns it will take to fulfill The Big Dig’s contract requirements. Hopefully somebody else on staff picks up that slack for me.

I drop off food at New Alexandria, replace my armor at their Mod Shop, and set my sights on the Railmen’s enclave—the first of four Raider enclave battles I’ll have to win to fulfill Kill ‘Em All. The Twins issue from their gates to challenge me and get cratered. I leave with smoking barrels, looted food and water.

The Rock outpost buys the food, New New York gets $25 in Bailout funds (chalk one Priority First-Class Contract). I make a beeline for Bonesaw’s enclave. Sky Captain emerges to contest me, but the missiles I picked up in Motown are too much for him; his craft is splintered in a fusillade on his first attack pass. My hold is full of food and weapons, too. Two down. The Raiders are getting served like I’m a short-order cook.

There’s nowhere good to sell anything, so I replenish my missiles and head right for Nein Nein’s Raider HQ because I’m feeling myself. I pull impatiently into The Library en route, hoping to pull a third Priority contract so I can win without the tedium of the Big Dig: I pull “A Solid,” which will mean taking on some smuggling work for the New Republic Army. Cool. I tangle with The Family at the Nein Nein compound. I keep my missiles in reserve and lose, damaging my armor.

My ally and machine gun finally earn their keep as my tussle with The Fam spills into the next day’s action. We light them up good. That’s three successful punitive raids on the Raiders. I could make it to The Eyeless’ hideout and sew this thing up, but I have no Pillage actions left. Gonna burn a few turns dropping off my burgeoning cargo hold contents just for laughs. New Chernobyl snags my food and Serenity pays 10 $crap for the ammo crate I’ve got. I’m back on the road, about to knock on The Eyeless’ door.

The Eyeless come out understrength, fielding The Harvesters, who reap a bounty crop of my heirloom .50 cal seeds. The enforcement action on all Raider enclaves is complete. There’s a lot of driving ahead to get to The Citadel, the only place I can fish for New Republic smuggling runs that the greaseballs at The Archive need done. I hit The Citadel’s driveway with my last gear at unsafe speeds and draw the “Muck and Brass” job; I have water on hand to complete the smuggling run, but New Chernobyl, the destination, is another massive drive. I’m set upon by the Nein Nein truck en route. The Maw is behind the wheel. He’s a rugged dude, so I uncork the missiles for him and deny the Nein Nein’s attempt at retribution.

My replacement shields melt down in a rad zone on the next stretch of road, but I dump the water barrels at New Chernobyl, fire The Creep and put Armistice in my sleeper cab. Her movement bonus proved invaluable on the home stretch of the first chapter. She seems glad to see me. The Archive has half of their “Solid.” I’m not worried about combat and damage; I have plenty of cash and don’t mind stacking some hits on unused cargo holds if it means I can haul ass with Armistice and close this out.

It’s a long drive to The Citadel as Armistice tells me stories about her dad—Grand Lord Emperor Torque, the legend of highway terror who supposedly died in a big battle with the New Republic Army at Silo 42—but I pull the “Train Station” mission. The Citadel is also selling the weapons I need to deliver to Terminus, which is only one outpost away. I burn a turn getting gouged for a crate of weapons, then get it back in first gear.

We’re on a glide path now. We rumble over a few miles with Hasil Adkins on the tape deck and soon Terminus has their weapons, “A Solid” has been completed, and three Priority First Class contracts are in the bag. On to the next chapter! Although Armistice’s stories about Pops seem to suggest that this monster may figure largely in whatever’s to come next.

Summary: It was fun rebalancing the bus’ slots to have offensive punch and trade capacity—The Fallen’s capacious Sleeper Cab (pulling The Archivist’s Respect mission on my setup draw was a boon), and the early purchase of a Machine Gun + General Purpose extra cargo hold provided enough early impetus to give me all the cash I needed, plus affordable repairs and replacement missiles for the heavy fighting. Not bad!

Next: #3. Less Than Dead

Two Songs That Amazed Me Last Winter

File under: Non-hip hop listening that somehow spun bleak mid-winter mid-evenings into pre-bedtime revelations. Mucho gusto.

“Monomania,” Deerhunter
Amazing how a sprig of melody can tease despair into a wider, protean ache pulsing with ecstatic light. You can feel hope or rage or some nameless, riveting aggregate of the two. That's one of my favorite moments as a listener: "What, exactly, am I feeling right now?" And upon subsequent listens: "What techniques are being used to do this to me?"

This landed on my playlist after I found an article about the 10th anniversary of Deerhunter's Monomania. The writer talked about frontman Bradford Cox's state at the time in relation to the title track, which I listened to right after reading the article.

“In my head/There's something rotten and dead/I can't compete with,” he croaks in a highly processed voice seconds before the song launches into one of Deerhunter's signature Heroic Layered Fadeouts that take up half the song. Except they subvert the formula so the usual dreamy surrender becomes disintegration. There's a very pretty and simple guitar melody, but it is subsumed by what I take to be an obsessively sculpted sonic portrait of allostatic overload. Alcoholism. Nervous breakdown.

The little melody gets buffeted and nearly drowned by groaning walls of feedback (wait, is that the sound of a go-kart engine or chainsaw they're throwing in there?), and it's oddly soaring, if soaring means escaping any geometric plane at steep angles regardless of the orientation of the surrounding world. I listened to it six times in a row before bed and it felt like the only important thing that happened all day.

“Unwritten Law,” The Sound
Most of the time I "shop and hunt" with my music list. I hear a track that wallops me. Calculate that a track that good will have maybe two others that make me feel that way. Play the LP, harvest the handful of star efforts into the big list and move on.

But if intriguing singles from a particular act keep surfacing—especially one whose sound and smarts feel ahead of the curve or spring out of a lacuna in my mental map of an era—I'll stop and listen longer. Enter Jeopardy by The Sound. For the purposes of feeding readers a morsel, I'm going to put a single track at the end of this entry, but I played this thing front to back and was rewarded.

At first I assumed I was hearing a polished and studied post-punk revival band from c. 2008, like somebody trying to subtly optimize old recipes. But I looked it up and gaped at the result. They did this in 1980. They predicted every slick, moody trick that bands like INXS and Flock of Seagulls and U2 would use to flood the charts in '83. It's punchy and saturnine. Full of good hooks. Rutilant with a smoldering confidence. It shifts from austere to jubilant—within and between songs—with such sure-footedness and absolute trust in their arrangements and mixing. Like a sentence that reveals just what it means to and not a syllable more.

After I did my first room-to-room tour of Jeopardy, here's the track I circled back to put on repeat while drinking Starkville-style toddies and pitying every dunce who was not in that room with me. (One of many nifty touches here: I love how the chorus is just instrumental the first two times and he sings on the third one. Showcase that toothsome bass string and beautiful lead melody, let it glisten and chug while the lead singer broods in the cut to emerge at the end. All the best drugs at all the right potency in the divine sequence.)

Wasteland Express Delivery Service Solo Campaign Mode: Session 1

I decided to play the Campaign Mode of this game solo. There is no formal solo mode, so I’m merely tracking how many turns it takes me to lock down three Priority First-Class Contracts. At the end of the first game, I realized I’d defaulted to Nathan’s “I Hate Event Decks” Variant out of sheer forgetfulness. Take my accomplishments here with a grain of salt; upon review, my turn-by-turn notes sometimes revealed I’d done way more than was possible with five actions. And there were gaps where I didn’t record important checkpoints. Nonetheless, the story is still mostly here, which is why I did this in the first place. I’m playing the entire campaign as The Fallen, the salty former cultist who drives a school bus.

Public Priority First Class Contracts
• Blue Screen of Death
• Kill ‘Em All
• Smuggler

Turns Elapsed: 9 (I think)

I’m joined early by Chief, a New Republic Army soldier whose specialty is helping me earn bigger paydays on weapons deliveries. I’ve also drawn a smuggling job from the Archivists faction, so I’m thinking of starting there as it will give me progress towards the Smuggler Priority Contract on the board.

Are you happy now, you bastards? The Fallen seals Chapter One by completing the Fiat Currency mission.

A handy northern cluster of outposts allows me to buy some food for just 1 $crap and quickly deliver it to Terminus, a location operated by the New Republic Army, fulfilling the Archivists’ smuggling mission. I also draw an extra mission from Terminus on the way and land another smuggling run—this time for the New Republic Army, which I quickly fulfill at Delos.

Cash on hand is now good. I peer across the wastes and see a throughline from Dispatch back to the Depot. Soon I’ve got some tech artifacts in the bus; that’s progress toward both the Smuggler and Blue Screen of Death Priority First-Class contracts. Now I look northeast, through an irradiated zone and to the stronghold of Corinth, where I hope to be able to pick up more smuggling work from the Oracles of Ceres.

I burn a turn handing off a swaddled motherboard over to Dispatch. It’s wrapped in a copy of SPIN Magazine from 1991. LL Cool J’s in that issue. My armor sizzles a bit in the rad zone en route before acquiring the Surprise Party smuggling mission from the wackadoodles in Corinth. The rads cook the rest of my armor off immediately on the trip back out, but I make it back to Dispatch and secure a crate of weapons to boot.

The weapons are offloaded at Delos. Oh: Molls Electric has also been taking up room and farting in the sleeper cab and doing nothing, so I boot her in favor of Armistice because I’m tired of waiting for rock-bottom current water market prices to move. The Smuggler Priority First-Class mission is now complete. 

I pick up another ungainly wad of half-melted server racks for Depot, but I’m out of Outpost actions. With Armistice’s second-turn movement boost, though, I can replenish my depleted bank with a quick buy-and-flip of some foodstuffs between neighboring forts just on the other side of The Depot.

Soon Blue Screen of Death is 2/3 complete. Have fun with the wadded server racks, boys, I’m sure there’s something you need in there. I’m approaching a decision point: I will have to either build a war chest to turn my bus into a combat rig or pull a primo contract of some other kind. I’m leaning toward the latter. Right now I spot another food-flip opportunity, so I opt for quick $crap and fish for new missions at The Citadel. It’s a junky little job, but weapons just came up for sale here and prices are soaring; looks like Chief is going to earn his keep at last.

Now I’m just chasing shiny objects because the cash is irresistible. The Rock, The Citadel and Terminus are all right in a row, either selling ammo or desperate to buy it. The stashbox in the bus is groaning now, so I dash halfway across the board to buy the last tech artifact required for Blue Screen of Death. But not before I dump yet more weapons at Delos. People are getting strapped up around here! Ammo prices are starting to flatten because of the minor glut I caused, so I take an Outpost action at The Depot on my next move. Blue Screen of Death is complete and so is Smuggler.

Hmm: I’ve got 18 $scrap on hand. Do I gamble on another Priority First-Class Mission pull or resign myself to arming up at the Mod Shop for a military grind to fulfill Kill ‘Em All? Naw. I haul ass to The Library and see if the Archivists have anything interesting for me to do. Bingo: I pull the Fiat Currency mission. And The Library is selling water, which New New York wants.  This feels like less of a slog than Kill ‘Em All, so let’s see how fast I can deliver to New Chernobyl, New New York and New Alexandria. By the end of the turn, I’m rolling off the first water barrels in New New York.

I buy food in The Citadel (for one $crap, no less!) then barrel along to flip it to the hungry folks at New Chernobyl. The Citadel’s selling food again (although not for $1), so I head back there to cool it until I can make the next purchase. Then it’s a long drive with Armistice all the way to the southern reaches to feed New Alexandria.

I buy another pallet of sus MREs in The Citadel and hit the road, getting the load to New Alexandria after a long drive. The sale’s done and I’ve done my part to prop up The Archive’s economic house of cards with some tangible goods. That’s the win!

Final Thoughts: I had 35 $crap just bouncing around the bus unspent. I never bought a mod nor tangled with a Raider. One thing that’s different about playing this way: It was easier to analyze the board at my leisure and stay focused with no downtime or banter. You’d think the downtime with other players would make you more lucid, but after watching three other dudes go and riffing on their various mishaps, sometimes you forget what the hell it was you set out to do.

Fortunate clusters of settlements and insanely convenient strings of demand/supply markers were a major factor here. These plus Armistice’s second-move distance bonus, no opponents throwing Raiders in my way, plus a good late mission pull at The Library let me focus on a fairly frictionless trade route to victory.

Next: #2. Secret Mission

Boardgames and Debauchery Essay Contest: The Details

WHAT: Your tales of where chemical excess and boardgames collided for spicy and memorable debacles, told in 750 or fewer words.

WHY: I’ll read good ones on an episode of Breakup Gaming Society (with your express permission, of course). My favorite wins a copy of Dustin Hyman’s Gutter Punks and a complimentary copy of “Chaotic Shots and Cocktails That Will Hurt Your Friends,” our new cocktail booklet.

WHEN: Entries close Friday, May 31.

HOW: Send your story to me via the email on our Contact page.

Cheers.

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 4

I packed the game away after my first-ever play, looked at the box for a few minutes, then took it all back out again for a second play. Following is a collection of notes and observations on my sophomore experience.

Setup: A random draw presents me with a Cut-Off situation in Iraq. I scour the cards to find the name of who’s responsible for letting a whole-ass airbase get encircled. As usual, there’s no accountability, just rigid parameters: I’m getting most of my Special Options points up front and there are very few ways to get any more. I’ve got five days to punch a hole in the approaching enemy forces that’s big enough to reopen supply lines.

Let’s Try it Again from the Top, But With More Killing This Time, Work With Me, People, Work With Me: During my rookie mission I fielded a tiny squadron and sent them all at one target for the first few days to make game management simpler and just focus on mechanics. This time I want to have more craft that I can combine for separate strikes starting on Day 1. I end up with five: a Harrier, an F-16, an A-10A, and two AH-64s.

I want to commit Day 1 just to strikes on the enemy’s front-line assault elements: Degrade their ability to project force, then practice equipping missions that reach support and command elements in the rear range band — exotic regions I never saw during my inaugural game.

Looks like this scenario will penalize me for using craft or pilot replacement options. Looks like the only way to earn more SO points — there is no daily income in this episode — is to knock the hell out of stuff. You want resources? Let’s see some blowed-up stuff. The enemy’s hand is already closing around your windpipe.

Beginner’s Strategy Heuristics: To simplify the strategic puzzle, I’m carrying over the basic approach I settled on during my first game: Low and fast. My Day 1 crew is comprised entirely of pilots with the Fast ability (they get to fire before enemy units do). I don’t care if they’re good at other things, just give me the ones whose DNA helixes spell out K-I-L-L. These are the guys who you don’t turn loose anywhere but places like these, because they’ll pick off a civilian airliner or two out of restless hunger if you’re not constantly feeding them live target data.

Keeping the mission at low altitude means I can focus on zooming through selected lanes where they can do their dirty business in between ridgelines. No fancy Ridge Evasion checks for me. And no Pop-Up units (for each craft that starts a Loiter Turn at high altitude, you have to do a blind pull from a bag of Special Surprise Jerk Counters that might appear on the map). During my first game, Pop-Ups offended me to an almost pathological degree. I don’t like being interrupted. So we’re not doing any of that.

Privation, The Great Teacher: Having nearly all of the SO points given to me at once turned out to be an instructive limitation: With SO points desperately low as the mission days went on, I got a lot more familiar with each type of munition and what it does. I was setting tight budgets for each sortie and finding out how very much I could do with a little. I didn’t have to go grab my Xanax if there were damage markers on my craft; I got a lot better at picking which kinds of dings I had to deal with right away and which I could just let ride. (“Oh, waaah, your display is damaged. Just don’t shoot stuff from real far away, stupid. Get right up on ‘em, it’ll be fine.”)

Still Learning: When I teach others new games, I always remind them that they’re going to get major stuff wrong and to not be too upset about it. I got anxious enough to forget my own bromides. I was applying the Evasive ability wrong. I wasn’t applying Battalion notes correctly. I was routinely forgetting basic steps. I still got chewed to pieces, even with the little accidental advantages I gave myself through blithe incompetence. But as I re-read the fan-compiled FAQ on Boardgame Geek, I remembered that I was just one of hundreds of dudes effing stuff up, getting stuck, re-reading, and figuring it out in a distributed fraternity of souls siloed in thrill and despair.

Speaking of which: The several days I ran my first few games were a carousel of confusion and insight, joy and rage. I noticed last week my left eye looked a bit cloudy. I tell you in all candor that I think I popped a blood vessel in my eye screaming at Tex. He went down in his AH-64A, killed on impact from a SAM hit. His job was to take it out with LAU-61 rockets. It was important to clear this hex out, so I committed two rocket pods to the attack. Two chances to produce a four on a ten-sided die. He had some diabolical talent for avoiding the plainly achievable. Whatever came out of my mouth next would have been Q.E.D. in any divorce proceeding in any court in the U.S.

But I was already already divorced anyway, so fuck it. My hygiene suffered during these days. I hadn’t been happier in recent memory.

***

By Day 5, I can tell I’m en route to a failing grade: There are no more SO points, and despite getting pounded to half strength, my Day 4 mission troubles must have emboldened the armored spearhead battalion I tangled with the day previous. They’re advancing.

But I have rested pilots who I’m going to pile into these once-gleaming craft for one more run. Fuck mission ratings. Fuck victory points. It’s you and me, assholes, one last time. The damage markers on these craft are comically dense, but it’s late in the day and we have murder in our hearts.

I love this fucking game so much. I don’t rue the days of the old Colorado Springs crew when this is on the table. When the board has the glow of morning catchlight, I can’t even remember their faces. My eyes narrow as I sip some scalding coffee, look at the distribution of the new target battalion’s units over the terrain hexes and start planning attack lanes. I want for nothing.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
New Series: Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, Pt. 1

Bunkers & Fortresses: Examining Places of False Safety

This piece got rejected from a litmag the same week I got really sick, so that seemed a good time to record it and publish it myself.

Cheers,
Nate


Pt. 1: A Sneeze in the Facial Politic AKA The Gut Biome of the Finzi-Continis

I wrote a novella-length collection of vignettes about my late 20s drinking days as a young professional in Denver. In the late '90s there was an incalculable swath of neon and summer balconies and cool restaurants between myself and the horrors of the age, which still felt as distant as the Stalin-era body counts I would roll out over the bartop to titillate other drunks.

In the last vignette ("Rockies v. Marlins 7.10.98") I tried to give the character — who is alcoholic, vain, a dreamer with reflexive contempt for anything not clever and well-dressed — a moment of gratitude for the human and physical infrastructure upon which he stands to dream and mock:

The concourse breaks open into a sort of little village just past right field, full of the promise of pizzas in boxes. A sign that says “Sangria Bitch” jabs at the corner of his eye. Eric looks again: “Sammy’s Burgers.” He stops and watches. They mill up to the bored and edgy staff in the ubiquitous vendor’s red polo, holding the entire city on the tops of their heads with their moment’s distraction in reaching for napkins, for money. Now the thought of it all falling quiet leaves cold pits in Eric’s stomach. Tonight he needs an unfettered expanse of home games to bring it back to life, or another season to dream into, one to make it hum and shuffle again, everybody perpetually distracted with snacks, scores and seats beneath the lights — he needs for there to be Major League Baseball forever.


The Aisle Inviolate. The Display Eternal. The Package Resplendent. The Appetizer Inexhaustible.

These are the sturdy ships that rocked sickeningly in the first waves of COVID. And people couldn't take it. They couldn't handle the idea that the natural state of being is not dawdling in box store aisles and buying throw pillows and gorging at Red Robin.

We all got rocked. But this particular response was telling. Being that "shopping" and "I cannot process the effects of my choices upon others" aren't that compelling as ideological rallying cries, we saw the apoplectic emergence of a new breed of skeptics and rebels who — lives given over without examination in every other respect to the corporate surveillance state — howled for the comforts they knew.

The true national anthem turned out to be a massive howl for a safe space from the center of a globe-spanning set of concentric rings made of violence — drone-launched ordnance flowering in the midst of God-knows-who in AFRICOM's purview, bastards of every description raining down piles of their cut from the post-Afghanistan inventory redirect, vast oceans, two major borders buffered against tumult — and within that, soothing parkways with high medians and ceremonial brick fortresses announcing this or that developer's satrapy, well-patrolled by tac-vested former grunts, and within that, surveilled homes stocked with more weapons, even casual Saturday wear hinting at both athletic and special ops competence.

I am fairly certain my borders were overrun more than once.

In the few weeks in between the wave of Asian epicenter stories and reports of first cases in the U.S. and — this squelched any denial I had about the scope of the thing — the NBA announcing cancellation of the season after Rudy Gobert tested positive. (Again, the gleaming concourse in the sports redoubt closes, the drunken gurgle of collective consumption rudely cut short!)

Sometime in this span, I rode out what felt like the worst flu of my life for three days in a rented basement on one of the whitest lanes of northern Colorado Springs, with the footfalls of the two whitest people on the street overhead. I remember laying nearly motionless for an entire day of it because every centimeter of skin wailed. Even resting and motionless, my sweats and soft long T hurt my skin. It migrated to my chest. I expelled green stuff in hacks for weeks later and my lungs haven't felt the same since.

And later, once the lease in the basement was up and I was on the road, trying to buy a house further south in what was incidentally the hottest real estate market ever recorded in Colorado — that my little Fortress America collapsed again in a 2.5-star hotel where I had paid for two nights, but left after one because there were a steady stream of people who had enough money for a room that night disappearing into the juniper landscaping across the parking lot to party with those who didn't and the blinds were mangled and my window was directly next to a punishing sodium vapor lamp and the traffic, despite this place not even being on a minor artery, circled allll night.

The dread waves of influenza, plague, the titillating millions at which I marveled third martini in hand. This perch dissolved absolutely, and I didn’t even have to take a teargas pellet in the nuts from a pissed-off cop in riot gear to get the message.

You don’t even need time-lapse to watch it collapse. You, too, can become a nameless casualty of the age.

How many layers of protection can you wrap around the atomized, middle-class 21st Century Precious Self?

"Not many," said the wind that drove the fire through Mountain Shadows and the Marshall/Boulder neighborhoods. "But you can add religion and a religious attraction to particular health supplements, if you like."



"Not many," said the toothfish as it gorped up an alluring pellet of plastic. The toothfish will be sold to you as Chilean sea bass at proper markup in an establishment where the staff is well-practiced in shooing homeless out of the lobby. But you still have to look at ‘em on the way back to your car. They can only make this so easy for you.

Not many i can barely hear through my right ear anymore and my sense of smell can pick up on a handful of noxious things with suffocating accuracy but its generally shit across the board and although this is a poor part of the country i have the goodwill of my mostly chill working-class neighbors and People That Don't Belong Here generally do not make the dirt in front of my house crackle under their tires, I can still be "found" I cannot with the envelope of senses given and inadequate countersurveillance skills track the germ that slays me nor the surveillance node that logs me.

I held my breath and hoped someone else got picked.


Pt. 2: Bond Villains and the Halfling's Lair


The only thing more repugnant to my prepubescent self than a movie's plot tilting toward finality — to this day, ending credits and the song overlaid produce a sui generis melancholy — was the mechanized imperative to destroy the villain's lair.

I thrilled to the villain lairs. The idea of garrisoned, well-run headquarters hidden under volcanoes, on islands nobody could quite find before, seemed too important a space to just throw into the wood chipper of plot.

Don't blow it up. Just get everybody out so I can live there with my friends. Oh, to live supplied and fortified and act within without being acted upon, forgotten except for the ludic platoon I would select personally.

I don't explore wilderness places, but knowing they are there, something untrammeled, is psychological ballast. And I started to hate Bond. Always smirking his way through shootouts with tenpin private armies and closing all these fantastic spaces. Hated him for finding them. Hated him for blowing them up. I didn't care what they were for.


What were they for? 



I cannot remember what precipitated it: the family going to a few counseling sessions when my Mom remarried and we all lived in Springfield, Missouri. I don't remember more than one session. But at this session, the therapist asked us to each draw a house of some kind.

I still played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back then with a buddy who was a Santa Claus dungeon master. I had a halfling character who he showered with preposterous goodies and wealth for hacking my way through the most remedial adventures. My halfling was hilariously wealthy for a character of such pedestrian feats, and I used downtime, finding a section of one of the manuals that suggested or distinctly outlined the cost of tunneling through stone.

Toward the end of my AD&D career, I think I spent more time planning his hideout than I did going on adventures. He'd done a "sold the company to Oracle"-level cashout. Time to make something swank and impregnable. 

So that's what I drew during the family therapist's exercise: a long tunnel leading to a large underground chamber.

I cannot recall her interpretation of this, if she ever gave one. There couldn't have been more than a session or two.


I draw and redraw this space, still.


Pt. 3: Is the Water Boiling Yet

While the character suicided before the formal narrative picks up and is recalled only in flashback, I keep hearing the lucidity of her proposition. I'm speaking of the mother and wife from McCarthy's The Road.

Her dilemma is yours and mine: What is your dashboard for deciding when the pooch is screwed? Post-apocalyptic novels have a clear-as-day inflection point: a flash in the sky, then everything's ash dead and people start eating each other. I think I have a pretty good response plan laid in for that one — break out the bourbon and watch the skies. My quads are probably all tough and stringy by now anyway. Go ahead, use my skull for a soup bowl, I don’t give a shit, just make it fast.

This slow boil, though. It gets murky: Was it Jonathan Knowles' eliminationist speech at CPAC? The soft coup that put Dubya in the Oval Office? Capture of the public pleasure centers by Facebook while the public square gets shut down, and what can't be shut down gets privatized and choked and thorny with the logic of transaction? Was it when the first boutique bakery for dogs opened?

I get up in the morning just like you out of stupid animal drive and do things that I think will make me feel good and I architect mid- and near-term narratives — imaginable futures in which I am viable.

Was that it? Was it Hiroshima? Flint being poisoned in broad daylight? The weird throb that settles in on my left side after meals? The last of the beauties I threw away?

Always peering out the curtains looking for the Big One and trying to simultaneously count the cuts from the Little Ones in my pockets, my lungs, blind to the bright line.


Pt. 4: Red-Teaming Your Getaway Idea


Quick thought experiment for you: When Peter Thiel evacuates to his underground fortress in New Zealand, do you have a seat on the plane?

Didn't think so.



And I don't want to hear about the 400 lbs. of beans you have in canisters or all your weapons and generators. This will get you through a period of disruption for longer than your comparatively defenseless fellow Americans in the cities, but what you seem to forget is that you're going to go insane because 85% of the stuff that made life worth living will be gone, most notably, the social contract that lets even colossally dangerous pigs like Jeff Bezos stroll down a street in Manhattan with one measly bodyguard.



And as for the bunker itself: Here are the odds. There will be at least four people in Thiel's retinue who would cut his throat and sleep like a baby when they grasp that the game table has been flipped over and nobody's picking up the pieces.

That thing is gonna have ventilation, too. It can crumble from within and without…these pharaohs will be swallowed up by the sands, too. Didn't Bezos put a big, stupid clock in a mountain or something? It's going to make a plum find in a few centuries or so.

Douglass Rushkoff's account of being asked to consult five hedge fund billionaires about the best technology for securing their private bunkers — and for ensuring compliance among the vassals they'll need to serve them there — I consider a bellwether moment in civilization.

I have encountered these kinds of nightmare "What If?" games on the edge of sleep.

Before I became dependent on Ambien, an angel who, among other things, could help me forget I was going to sleep in an unhappy house and later helped me forget I was going to sleep in a strangers' rented basement and later would snap the lights off at any number of possibly dangerous two-star hotels up and down the Denver-to-Albuquerque corridor, I would construct an imaginarium to coax myself to sleep.


For the trick to work, the practitioner must have a certain level of bodily fatigue coupled with a sleep aid and a fresh memory of convincing harbor. If a recent passage from a book or movie I'd watched included a harried character grabbing a few hours of rest, the more vivid the peril-and-harbor gestalt sensation became.

But I had to eliminate the game because if I ran the scenario too many times, my imagination would make last-minute counterplays that collapsed it.

Nobody's going to get any sort of rest that way.

So it is with great pride that I offer the wealthy, visionary survivalists of the current age these vital auxiliary services:

• Three-Factor Poisoning: If you can remember the last names of one of your ex-wives plus a six-digit code and your UndefeatableTM voice key while you're still in your VIP PodTM or before your former head of security cups his hand over your mouth and puts a pig-sticker in your lungs, TFP will inject fast-acting mamba derivative via Compliance Collar* into nearest coded vendor.

Optional Code: Fourth-Factor poisons all vendors and team members (except you) simultaneously.

*Bonus Subscription Feature

• Failsafe: Ron. Ron is a pudgy dude who has a John Galt sticker on his 2001 Altima, loves his blue-and-white uniform, and monitors your bunker exclusively. Ron parks on The Switch. Like you, Ron has become appalled at the state of things and the temerity of the chef or bodyguard who has realized after month six underground that they, could, in fact, cut your throat and sleep like babies. Ron feels as violated by this as you do — he'll hit The Switch with a single confirmation from your doomsday pinky ring deal.

The Switch overrides all previous digital measures and countermeasures, AI or otherwise. Ron will arrive at your bunker via armored SUV and spirit you away to an intermediary secure location so you can plan your next move, have access to high-def, bombproof videoconferencing and a variety of guaranteed plastic-free high-energy snacks.

Except Ron is going to lose comms with the fallback bunker en route. The SUV will take small-arms fire and the suspension will already be compromised owing to heavy off-road jinking necessitated by the higher-than-expected density of ad hoc barricading of surface lanes. Are you all aflutter? Don't worry. Ron has dreamt of this for decades. He has some definite ideas for how things should work going forward. You still have weapons, three liters of Fiji and some kelp jerky.


God, I hope you like Ron.

Pt. 5: Itchy Patch

It took months to get the plumber here. He had been preceded over the months by a procession of ineffectual visitors — some were septic pros who started the clock before diagnosing the problem, others were well-meaning barflies who had oversold their talents — but I finally got a walkthrough from a dude with a real van and a quarter mil of equipment on hand in his working van.

I feel part of the world re-forming under me as our conversation reveals points of resonance with previous hunches and something resembling a good read on the problem.

I ushered him through the insulated flaps separating my kitchen and living room so he wouldn't have to stand in the cold while I wrote him a modest check for his consultation. I showed off the exposed flooring in the living room. I don't have many skills, but I did have the sense to invest in protective gear and a few crappy tools and rip out many square feet of filthy shag carpeting.

"Wow, that's original pine flooring, huh?"

Except this side room had real hardwood. And, as I invited him to peek into my bedroom, have you ever seen flooring with a pattern like that? Had to be the 1970s, right?

"Guarantee you it's made out of asbestos," he said.

Does that have anything to do with the itchy patch that erupted on my left forearm last fall? It's still itching. Sometimes it throbs. I want to get it checked out, but I'm uninsured. Plus I'm a grand plus in the hole from the emergency room visit from those dogs down the road that attacked me during a stroll. The basement here flooded from a once-in-a-decade gully washer and I hand pumped it myself and sprayed it down with a bleach solution, but it's a big, old basement and who knows what's wafting through my ratty nose and into my lungs at night?

I saw one of those clickbait personal finance headlines about the kind of money you need just for healthcare as you age, like are you fucking kidding me, the sturdiest defense I can erect is selling something off for a few thousand dollars, which erects a palisade around a few months where I can rest when I am tired, eat when I am hungry, and only work on that which feels nourishing and necessary. Or sometimes just pouring a first stout at my folding table at 3 p.m. because I can. I experienced suicidal ideation at my last remote job, not because I wanted to die, but because the hassle:output ratio was so out of wack. I'd look through the swinging barn-style doors of my garage and would daydream about throwing a sturdy rope over the rafters, not because I didn't want to live, but having a bit of agency in knowing I didn't have to live like this.

Whence harbor?

As curtains of flame rise over every forest in the west and campfire smells spike my cortisol production from hundreds of miles away, I have finally realized the art of doing what a boss would call "nothing."

That barrier is thinning: I've cashed out the obvious assets. I'm fortunate to have some equity in this old house, but this house is the last chip in my pocket. I burned a layer of money to be a layer of brain that could rest and play, stuck atop a body no longer insulated by money. Existential memos could arrive from the downstairs departments any day, the dullards in the execution layer finally forcing the CEO out of the office, making themselves known. The little stack I have, barring forces majeures, feels like a small fortune — but next to nothing in the economy of healthcare for profit. It wouldn't buy me one day of being stabbed or wrecking my car or getting bone cancer.

I quake like a rodent over its late-winter stores.

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 3

Mohawk’s inaugural high-altitude pass in his F-16 resulted in a cratered enemy AAA unit — that guided 1,000-lb. GBU-16 is a hell of a drug. 

Then rookie mistakes set in: Mohawk wasted a cluster bomb trying to take out two tanks, then I blithely ended his movement right in the sights of an enemy chopper, which would have shot him down had I not equipped the bird with an ECM unit. Mohawk chuckled his way through several attempts at reprisal.

Thor swooped in with his A-10’s cannons to shred the chopper soon after. All this time, Grandpa was tasked with hunting a pair of command units, one of which he eliminated with a tidy volley of Hellfires. But owing more neophyte sloppiness in the commander’s chair, I’ve also exposed the craft to costly potshots from another enemy chopper and AA unit: Thor and Grandpa have accumulated Stress points and taken hits to their pylons, which compromise the amount of effective weight they can carry in ordnance. 

This matters less to Thor, who still has a Wal-Mart distribution center’s worth of boom-boom slung under the wings of the A-10, but Grandpa’s little Cobra only has two big-punch munitions left and his cannon efficacy isn’t good enough to bank precious attack turns on….

As I age, the more painful the gap between complexity and desire becomes. Bouncing around between three different applications and four different source docs to harvest some sliver of Boring out of 15 different shards of Boring for some boring-ass project makes my mind claw for Elsewhere like a mouse trying not to drown in a jar. 

But last night, driven by the building tickle of finally feeling all the game’s information and steps start to gel, I fought through it until I got into something resembling a flow. I was still doing stuff wrong — LOS, figuring out who can shoot and who and when and with what — still had me bouncing back and forth between the rulebook and BoardGameGeek forums every few minutes. But the mound of stats and chips was starting to take the shape of a game. And now I’m hungry and I want more. I’m finally feeling the thrill, the quiet pride and accomplishment of figuring it out.

Building odd monuments with a single viewing chair in a protean gallery of your own learning experiences is one of the things you learn to treasure as a solo gamer. I believe these little triumphs and insights enrich the inner life.

So Day 2 of the mission looms, and per the restrictions of the Rapid Deployment scenario, I can’t switch any pilots out. Just to see how it goes, I’m going to split my trio of flyers into two separate groups and see if I can effectively harass two enemy battalions.

Are ya winnin’, son? Grandpa and Mohawk barely made it back from the Day 2 foray vs. an enemy recon battalion. Thor’s Stress is pushing Shaken range even before he’s in the air. Feels irresponsible to send him out, but I’ve explained to him that this is a learning experience for all of us.

My expectations for this experiment are low: Grandpa was a mess after Day 1. He’s one more hit from crashing after failing a Ridge Evasion check that put his Stress levels close to the Unfit range. Also now there’s a Munition Shortage, so I’m trying to find a few missiles he can fire off while hovering and hopefully exit before he gets shot down, which almost feels like an inevitability. Mohawk, his craft still undamaged, will be hunting the rest of the hexes vs. an assault battalion, while Thor—whose Stress levels have also crept up dangerously—is heading after a separate target to see what he can get away with.

Quibble: I think I’m going to ignore the step where the rules say to strip damage and stress counters off of the pilot and craft cards, then log them all on the sheet during the bookkeeping steps. Why not just track them with the counters on the cards? It’s a better dashboard for me. Maybe this doesn’t work when you have bigger squadrons and more damage to track, but it feels like an efficient workaround for now.

Part One
Part Two
Part Four

A Reading of Dustin Hyman’s “Church of Pit”

A reading of Dustin Hyman’s Algren Award-winning short story, “Church of Pit.”

NARRATION: The Lord Chief Rocka and Dustin Hyman

MUSIC: “Sugar in De Gourd,” Louisiana Folksong Jambalaya, Harry Oster (Internet Archive)

Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 2

It’s about to get hot: Thor’s A-10A and Mohawk’s F-16 are poised to criss-cross the 10-hex tactical map—at low altitude and high altitude, respectively—and knock out as many surface-to-air threats as they can on their first pass. The hexes are sprinkled with 10 units from an enemy armor battalion, including tanks, anti-aircraft units and choppers.

Between them is Grandpa, hovering menacingly in his AH-1 over a hex that contains an enemy mobile command vehicle, all plump and dumb and gunless. The plan is to have Grandpa mop up these high-point targets while Thor and Mohawk swoop over ridgelines and across desert, hunting targets that can shoot back.

My armament strategy was, “A little of this, a little of that.” I used three SO points against the weight allowances of the craft. The strategy? Buy munitions that had a lot of different names: “GBU-16, you say? Oh, that sounds lovely. Let’s bring along a bit of that.”

The boys went shopping and found some stuff they liked

Which brings us to a consideration of the imaginative space where these bombs, in a split-second of game time, will fall. I’m no fan of the last few decades of the U.S.’ actual desert escapades. There doesn’t seem to be an option for even voting against them anymore. Think about it too much and you’ll crawl atop your wargame collection in despair, doused in lighter fluid, for a fiery penitence.

But since I’m secretly 12, I still can’t resist the “toys” themselves—or the games that allow a 54-year-old to go “PEW! PEW! BRRRRT!” in tactical systems with a toothsome degree of verisimilitude and no stakes outside the pebbled plastic of my Wal-Mart folding table.

But shit, you know what time it is: I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some version of this hardware I’m playing with isn’t falling on Palestinian families right now. What one person considers an escapist shoot-em-up will be the next person’s depression spiral. Who can settle in for a night at the opera when you can hear Napoleon’s artillery rumbling at the outskirts of town?* 

Immersing myself in the world of Thunderbolt Apache Leader as a private exercise takes some delicate bargaining with the imagination and the conscience. While I like games with militaries and combat, I get why people would rather play in arenas with anthropomorphic badgers building point systems on riverbanks, or trading buttons, or seeing who can make the fastest abstract bowl of noodles in a fictional restaurant. It’s an age of crisis. The theater walls and our psyches are paper-thin. The Worst of Everything is heaved from the wings directly onto center stage with volcanic fury. Play how you will, and when you can.

But back to my table and its accepted boundaries: I’m at the step where my pilots’ thumbs quiver angrily over the Fire buttons while I double-check attack rules, line of sight, altitude, target, and armament stats. Because all hell’s about to break loose. (P.S. I love this rulebook. There’s a lot of information, but it’s fastidious and procedural; crisp examples and well-chosen illustrations abound. I sense now—as I did when I first heard about it in 2012—that once the bookkeeping and engagement steps become second nature, this game will pack the perfect balance of engrossing detail and propulsive action.)

Frankly, it’s a godlike feeling and one of the most beautiful things about of the tabletop medium. The luxury of feeling the anticipation of a decision stretch in time. Seeing how it’s a node in a living story, part of a vivid diorama of tense action, partly under my control. Just maybe in a universe without an American God, one where flying sorties into Pakistani airspace is just a wacky thing that happens, and is forgotten in an afternoon.

*Every night for a year I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of Toby Longworth narrating Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40,000 books. It’s been a long day. Time to drift off to the sounds of a hive city being shelled into fragments. To mangle the famous Josef Stalin quote: “10 million deaths is a tragedy, 100 million is hysterical.”

Part One
Part Three
Part Four

“What We Listen to and Why,” feat. Josh Buergel: A Discussion and a Playlist

Imagine our delight in learning that software engineer Josh Buergel was not only a boardgame designer, but a simultaneously mordant and self-effacing capsule writer and tireless curator of music at his Five Random Songs blog. Josh indulged BGS in an exploration of stuff we love—and how people and delicate circumstance pushed our listening lives in new directions.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: I began by de-digitizing my morning and making a mental note of the random song snippet that was in my head when I woke up. It seems to arise from the same part of my mind where anxious second voices offer unwanted running commentary, but it was a good track: "Santa Cruz" by Fatboy Slim. 

I've revisited several tracks from Better Living Through Chemistry and found them even stronger than I remember. I overdosed on hip hop between '87-'94, but the UK big beat stuff became a staple of my mid-late '90s listening because it recalled the thrill of discovering hip hop: those Big Beat producers loved breakbeats, scratches, punchy vocal samples.

There are worse ways to start a day. How did your musical day start off?

JOSH BUERGEL: I came to Fatboy Slim from a different direction, as I was a big fan of The Housemartins back in the day, so knowing that Fatboy Slim was Norman Cook made me more curious than I otherwise would have been. I was never a huge Big Beat guy. During that time period, I was mostly consumed with indie rock and noise rock, but I definitely sampled it here and there. 

I have to relate one of the dorkiest anecdotes I have: I was in debate in high school (that's not the dorky part, or at least, not all of it), which meant that I spent a fair bit of time hanging out with other high schoolers in motels with limited supervision. However, this didn't result in any of the bacchanalian hijinks that the movies of the time would have led me to expect. No, it mostly led to things like "gluing ceiling tiles back in place with spray cheese" and "teaching ourselves how to play bridge." 

One time, as we sat around a room listening to The Housemartins, a favorite among that group, we decided that we were going to record our own little cover of it. In the absence of proper recording equipment, we disassembled a headphone and secured it at the bottom of a lampshade, giving us a makeshift mic. We gathered around and did a shout-sing into a lampshade, recording straight to a cassette tape, belting out "Sheep" as best we could. Did it sound terrible? You know it. Did we have fun? Absolutely. Did we get yelled at to keep it down? I think you know the answer to that.

Anyway, my musical journey this morning began when I woke at 4 a.m. out of unspecific anxiety. As my unfocused mind tried to go back to sleep, it flipped through my mental songbook and settled on the punchy intro to the Slackers' "Every Day is Sunday” Not the whole song, mind you. Just that intro, looped into infinity like a klaxon for the world's coolest old-timey fire engine. It's reminiscent of the horrible old Wiseblood track, "Death Rape 2000": seven and a half minutes of three notes drilling their way into your skull. At least I didn't have that in my head, I suppose.

Where did you head after Big Beat? For me at least, I had to purge "Every Day is Sunday" by actually listening to the tune, and I headed from there to listen to the rest of the album, which is a treat.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Ah, remembering your penchant for ska guitar from my Five Random Songs listening. Hopefully that killed the earworm.

One note on Fatboy Slim and The Housemartins: I had London 0 Hull 4 on tape in high school and didn't uncover the connection until I'd been listening to breakbeats for several years. I hope you have that recording you made somewhere.

Mid-'90s to early aughts began my tutelage: My boss, Tim, and two of my colleagues, Michael and Sam, took me to school. There is no algorithm that will ever replicate the range and depth of stuff they turned me onto. And they'd do it in the coolest way possible: I'd hold forth on the handful of things I knew about, and they'd be like, "Yeah, I love that shit, but check this out." I knew a lot about a little. They knew the best five adjacent alternatives for everything I would rattle off. Electronic, psychedelia, punk and art punk, metal, jazz, garage rock, soul...

One of my favorite lessons: closing the bars one night and ending up at Sammy's place. I had a Photek CD I had just bought on the strength of a good review. The first track was good, and I was trying really hard to like the rest, it being well-reviewed and all. I tried to impress Sammy with it. It played for 30 seconds and he slurred, "We're not listenin' to this fuckin' porno music." Then he threw in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Eno and Byrne and just fucked my head up.

JOSH BUERGEL: Alas, I think that hotel-room Housemartins recording, scratchy and distant, is lost to time.

The value of a music guru in one's life cannot be overstated. In high school, as I began to develop actual music tastes and begin to explore what I might like, the closest thing I had to a local music guru was my oldest sister. And obviously, that was wildly unacceptable to a fourteen-year-old. This obstinate, rock-headed stance meant that I was slow to recognize that my sister's taste was really good, and led me to disdain The Clash and Elvis Costello for years. Youth is wasted on the dippest of shits.

I had friends in high school who were also exploring underground music. It was a challenge to find stuff in pre-internet days in Spokane, WA. The key guru in my life at that time was an anonymous dude that my debate partner (shut up!) and I met at a debate camp (SHUT UP!) at the University of California at Berkeley. 

As he lived in a far cooler part of the state, he had access to far more information about underground bands. When he caught us listening to Nitzer Ebb in the dorm while reading through newspapers for things we could egregiously take out of context, he started talking to us about industrial. It became clear that we didn't know a whole lot—sure, Nitzer Ebb and Nine Inch Nails, but those bands weren't hard to find. And we knew about Big Black, so that was pretty cool of us, comparatively anyway. Rather than disdain us as the hopeless busters we obviously were, he decided to educate us.

He wrote down a whole bunch of bands on a scrap of paper. Just off the top of his head, he threw down a canon of industrial and underground shit for us to track down, a Rosetta Stone, but for clattering noise and angry shouting. It became a quest for us find records from this list, some of which are still very much favorites. Einstürzende Neubauten, for one, was on the list, and they're not only absolute geniuses and one of my favorite ever bands, they're even still going. 

Foetus was on the list, and JG Thirlwell's catalog is untouchable. And that marks referencing his work in each of my installments thus far (he's half of Wiseblood). Coil was on the list, and God only knows how some random high schooler knew about them, but they rule and Horse Rotorvator is a stone-cold classic. And so we go. When I went off to college, I made sure that I got a transcription of the list to take with me, and I continued to hunt for records from it even then.

But beyond the actual contents of the list, which mostly ruled, what that list did was give me the courage to take shots on things. For whatever reason, prior to that point, I was cautious about buying new music and seeking new artists. I was eager for new sounds, but still conservative about things. I had to have some significant exposure to the music before I was willing to have a go. I gradually expanded my exposure to music, but at a slow-ish rate. The list, though, gave me permission to have a go at stuff based on vibes, a quick recommendation, a capsule review, a shared music label, whatever. Buying a blind record went from scary to thrilling, and that was a sea change in my relationship to music. My tastes exploded in that last year of high school and through college, fueled in the latter by getting involved with college radio and new friends big into music. But it all started with one guy at debate camp who made a list.

So, what's your list? You meet an eager kid, just starting to explore music, and want to blow them away. Who are your five acts that you want them to learn about?

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: To your point, you gotta grok what direction the kid's headed in if the recco's gonna stick. Cool recent story: Gal who works at the coffee shop I sometimes hit on Main St. Sweet kid, very talkative. Told me she was into classic jazz lately, “..like John Coltrane." After taking a couple seconds to process that fact, I got her to throw an Ella track on the shop's system—I was on a Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie kick at the time—and to keep an eye out for Lee Morgan, particularly Sidewinder. In hindsight, I'd tack Sidney Bechet, Hampton Hawes and Django in there for good measure, what the hell. That's five. That seems like a good exploratory starter kit for a young person who's receptive to jazz.

If it's out of their emotional frame of reference, it withers. Got another kid at the smoothie shop to listen to "Gates of Steel" by DEVO, but that's only because I found out during register chit-chat he didn't know who DEVO was, and I got all strident and weird and messianic about it. On the subsequent visit, found out he'd actually listened to it. He made some polite observations, but he didn't care about that shit. He didn't have a bridge to it. The bridge has to start on their side.

JOSH BUERGEL: It's my suspicion that for most people, it's basically impossible to predict what I'll call a breakthrough record. Once someone decides they like a genre or scene or whatever, they can and will explore freely within that genre, and will probably be pretty open to recommendations within that genre. The reason that list of bands worked for me is that I was already into industrial, so it was a way to explode that interest out in every direction. And sure, some of those bands pushed the envelope—to describe Foetus as like anything else is probably foolish—but those bands had a track record of appealing to fans in the genre, so it worked. But if that same list was presented to a kid who was mostly into what we called college rock at the time (R.E.M. and the like) or post-punk or new wave or whatever, it wouldn’t take.

There are blessed moments where a special record breaks through genres, knocks down the walls surrounding our tastes and shows us that we might love a different genre. I can name some of those records easily off the top of my head: Raising Hell showed me that I might love hip-hop (and Three Feet High and Rising and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back taught me I definitely did). Those three records are, of course, stone-cold classics, inner-circle hall of fame records that have been praised in every corner, and deservedly so. 

But the tricky thing about a breakthrough record is that there's no real way to predict it. An album has to hit someone with the right sound, at the right time, in the right mood. It's an alchemical process, pure serendipity, and the only way it's ever happened for me is just happenstance. I hear a thing in a store, on the radio, at a party, at a friend's house, wherever, and I get a blast of magic through my head. 

The album that cracked the door to punk open for me was Allroy's Revenge, by ALL (the band that descended from the Descendents). It hit me just right. I couldn't explain why, but it sounded great to me, and I made a copy of my friend's CD and listened to it a ton. That led me from there to other work by them, by the Descendents, other SST stuff, the Dead Kennedys, and on we go. But that breakthrough record? Nobody could have predicted it.

It's why, to this day, I just try stuff. Records that I don't know, bands that I don't know, genres I don't love (but might soon), all kinds of things. It's an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle again, and I'll never get tired of chasing that high. It's getting harder and harder for me as the years go on, but I'll never stop.

I got through all of that without saying I'm not qualified to talk about jazz. Not bad!

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: So, what track most recently created that serendipitous (and increasingly evasive) blast of magic out of nowhere for you? Let's hear it.

JOSH BUERGEL: Good question! I used to be kind of an off-and-on again metal guy. I always loved Metallica because I have ears. I really enjoyed Slayer after being curious why they were on Def Jam and getting my skull crushed by Reign in Blood. I learned about Napalm Death in college and just slowly added metal bands I followed gradually over the years. But I never really went out seeking things. Wasn't my scene, you see.

By 2013, that stable of metal bands that I liked had grown enough that I think most rational observers would conclude that I was a metal fan, but I still sort of resisted that notion. The record that pulled me over the line from "Yeah, I like some metal, but not a ton,” to "I suppose I'm a metal guy" was from Altar of Plagues. It got a nice writeup in the AV Club, so I picked up Teethed Glory and Injury. I was sitting in the parking lot of my son's preschool, having arrived early for pickup that day, and was listening to it in the car. It was riveting. Sure, I'd listened to black metal before and even enjoyed some of it, but the visceral impact of the album hit me just right. I got to "Burnt Year" and it all clicked. That song, in that parking lot, on that day, tipped me over. I became a metal guy.

I'm not sure I've been hit quite the same since then? The previous one I can really remember was when Easy Street Records in West Seattle put on "Up From The South" from the Budos Band in the store in 2005 while I was waiting for my table at the nearby Mashiko. It was instant love. I became rabid about soul instantly, especially the new wave of stuff at that time. I'd been at least an occasional soul listener, as any hip-hop fan sort of invariably is, but that record and moment really kicked it into overdrive. So, every eight years-ish I hit one of these on my own? 

Those aren't the only records I've fallen in love with over that time, of course, but those are time where my tastes shifted and came into focus, and my path of seeking music bent in some new direction.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: My revelations this summer came from revisiting bands that I could hear with new ears now that I'm no longer a teenager (well, not in most regards) and don't stridently base my whole identity on which group listens to what. With gentle nudges from two friends who pointed me at tracks I never listened to from For Those About to Rock, I spent about two weeks this summer, mostly drunk, just listening to Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, Motorhead and AC/DC. I went after grainy concert videos. Weird late-night showcases like Don Kirshner's Rock Concert salvaged from the VHS collections of diligent obsessives. Listened to stuff other than the handful of tracks that FM radio ground into the dirt.

I was like that Ford exec in Ford vs Ferrari when Damon's character took him for a little spin in the monster he and his fellow senior brass had commissioned, but hadn't experienced. It's a great scene. He was weeping at the end: "I had no idea!"

The last instance was something like that divine visitation. I was legless in my kitchen, somewhere in the temporal warp between midnight and false dawn. The accent lights I placed all over my kitchen transformed its hideous and dated surfaces into an ethereal rock club. I think I listened to "Southern Girls" by Cheap Trick 15 times in a row. Each replay my brain was picking out new small touches that made it work: the pristine backing vocal melody on the chorus, the way Rick Nielsen's reverb-y tricks over Bun E. Carlos' lunchbucket drum intro make you salivate for that first big downstroke chord. The joy was absolute.

I used to think I'd go watch the Battle of Hastings or see Charlie Parker play at Harlem clubs if I had a time machine. Give me that option today? I'd just rewind a few weeks and do that night again.

JOSH BUERGEL: The point about not caring who listens to what is certainly one of those gifts we gain with age, and it's without a doubt a valuable one. Young Josh wouldn't be caught dead listening to country (Uncle Tupelo didn't count, maaaaan). My dad always derided the stuff, which was omnipresent in eastern Washington, and I certainly absorbed his contempt. And while I haven't come around on pop country at all (it's bad), learning more about country has been a nice journey. I'm certainly not well-versed or anything, but there's some outstanding music out there, and I don't even flinch at the sound of a twang anymore.

Broadly, I think there's a lesson there that only took decades to sink in, which is if something has stood the test of time and still appeals to people, there's probably something of value there. And it's worth seeking that value and learning about it, not just to see if it's for you, but even to acknowledge that it's there. 

Plenty of stuff will come and go, not really have much of a legacy. But if it did and found an audience, "Why?" is a great question to ask. Why do people still get amped by AC/DC? Why does Cheap Trick still sound like a million bucks today? You can unpack the micro, like you are, and find brilliance at that level. You can let the macro wash over you, let out a little "Fuck yeah.” Doesn't really matter, because if you pay attention, you can hear the quality, and it'll click.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Yep. Speaking of which, you deserve to know that your efforts with Five Random Songs were not wasted on me. You're one of my Music Influencers, as proven by the fact I now have several tracks from The Fiery Furnaces on rotation and have for a couple years. At the time, it was lost on me in the hipster noise coming out of Brooklyn, but one night I hit Play on your site's embedded player...and I was sold.

So, good job, Mr. Save Stuff from the Cultural Memory Hole.

-FINIS-

Become My Fourth Follower on TikTok

I’ve been messing around with short-form video whenever I have a comedic riff in my head that won’t wait for the next episode. I’m starting to learn stuff. (P.S. iMovie is a thicket of non-intuitive functions and menu items. Anyway.)

I have some weird-ass fingers and other revelations of trying to select video thumbnails

50 Hip Hop Golden-Era Deep Cuts You Simply Must Experience

For Hip Hop’s 50th Birthday, I’ve updated my abandoned 100-track project, switched a few out because I found better entries, and created this so you could learn how to party.

This is not a ranked list. You can play all the tracks in it on this YouTube playlist.

1. Public Enemy, “Miuzi Weighs a Ton” 
All the kiddies go around citing Nation of Millions and Fear of a Black Planet because that’s what they read on hipster listicles and shit. Which is a shame, because PE’s debut album was A TOWERING MASTERPIECE OF SONIC AGGRESSION that stood alone in that year’s crop of incredible early Golden Era wax. Also see from same album: “Public Enemy No. 1” and, yes, that’s Terminator X scratching on Mike Muir’s opening cackle from the Suicidal Tendencies’ first album on “Raise the Roof.” This album is hip hop’s Nevermind the Bollocks...

2. Steady B, “Rockin’ Music” 
Used to be that it was de rigueur to let the DJ flex on at least one whole track of every album. Here DJ Tat Money puts in a workout with irresistible soul/disco hooks and a big, meaty drum machine track. (Fun fact: Steady B’s doing a life bid because when his career went south, his crew tried to rob a bank and sparked a shootout in which they achieved an ignominious first: First woman cop in Pennsylvania to die in line of duty.)

3. Run-DMC, “They Call us Run-DMC”
MCing styles evolved so rapidly from ‘86-’88 that by the time Run-D.M.C. followed up their mega-smash Raising Hell LP with Tougher Than Leather, they’d already been lyrically lapped by Chuck D, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Kool Keith et al. Nonetheless, I return to tracks from this album over and over because they’re still fun and the production kicks ass.

4. Audio Two, “Make it Funky”
Gizmo and Milk D will never be in the canon of microphone masters. They were more mixboard dudes who wanted to rap on their own beats (they were also producing stuff for MC Lyte at the time). Here they throw one of the best parties in hip hop with razor-sharp sampling, fun breaks and a few bars of shouted call-and-response crew raps. Daddy-O from Stetsasonic helped out on this one.

Not to be outdone for sheer fun: Milk and Giz of Audio Two

5. Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap, “Five Minutes of Death”
Extremely poor sound quality that I can only find on YouTube, but it’s like holding the superheated mother seed of the ascendant New School in your quaking hands. Superproducer Marley Marl eventually uses this beat on Big Daddy Kane’s classic, “Raw,” but at some point in the studio, he must have just let these drums run and told BDK and Kool G to go for it. No chorus. No pauses. No mercy. All fire.

6. DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, “The Magnificent Jazzy Jeff”
Legend has it that DJ Cash Money (of Cash Money & Marvelous Marv, another Philly duo) came up with the vaunted “Transformer scratch,” but accounts vary. Here Jazzy Jeff commits the technique to wax along with a cavalcade of ace turntable tricks. If there’s a better “DJ brag” track recorded during this time, I’ve never heard it.

7. Cash Money and Marvelous Marv, “Ugly People Be Quiet”
As long as we’re talking DJ Cash Money, let’s throw this early banger in, too. Pulse-pounding tempo and texture. Produced by Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor, who also discovered and produced Salt-n-Pepa. This is also the best Tears for Fears have ever sounded.

8. 3rd Bass, “Product of the Environment (Remix)”
Don’t fuck with the original album version. You want the remix off The Cactus Revisited. They replace the original’s puny funk bassline and tappity-tap drums with this stomper and rewrite a lot of the bars, which flow better to these drums as MC Serch and Pete Nice tell their tales of white boy come-up. This is the version they did when they came on In Living Color and gave Keenen Ivory Wayans some custom airbrushed shirts. Classy!

9. Poor Righteous Teachers, “Rock Dis Funky Joint”
One of the most astonishingly original microphone performances of all time from Wise Intelligent. Over an unconventional time signature and a bombproof sample, Wise floats, flows, stalls and stutters over seemingly endless verses, keeping all his switched-up rhyme schemes velvety and seamless. Total artistry. These guys were from Trenton.

Wise Intelligent cautions you against trying to recreate what he did on “Rock Dis Funky Joint”

10. Stetsasonic, “Pen and Paper”
Prince Paul said in interviews he was only 17 and not legally old enough to sign contracts when he joined Stet’s top-tier production team. Like that was stopping him. He gets production credit for this one, which is the sound of a young genius spreading his wings. Also a joyous paean to the act of writing. Not long after this, Paul leaves to produce Three Feet High and Rising and quantum-shifts from apprentice to legend. (Not sure where that bassline is from, but it also shows up in Boogie Down Productions’ electrifying remix of Steady B’s “Serious.”)

11. Black Moon, “Who Got Da Props?”
This was an instant underground classic that put Buckshot Shorty and Evil Dee on the map. Black Moon were aligned with the Boot Camp Clik (like Heltah Skeltah, Smif-N-Wessun — who became the Cocoa Brovaz after the gun manufacturer lodged a strong legal objection for obvious reasons). I remember going to a show in 2006 featuring Denver indie rappers and one of the Radio Bums dropped this beat and I looked around the room and everybody was lip syncing it word for word.

12. Lords of the Underground, “Chief Rocka”
DoItAll and Mr. Funke, New Jersey cats with roots in the black frat scene, tear it down over a beat produced by somebody I don’t know, but engineered by Marley Marl. Sexy-as-all-get-out bassline with an echoed snare and OMIGOD HERE COMES THE CHORUS AGAIN
THE LORD CHIEF ROCKA #1 CHIEF ROCKA
THE LORD CHIEF ROCKA #1 CHIEF ROCKA
THE LORD CHIEF ROCKA #1 CHIEF ROCKA
If you got beef, you can sleep with Jimmy Hoffa.

13. Fu-Schnickens feat. Shaquille O’Neal, “What's Up Doc? (K-Cut's Fat Trac Remix)
Technically, this is Shaq featuring the Schnicks because it came off of the lumbering center’s debut rap album, Shaq Diesel, in 1993. K-Cut’s Fat Trac version was repurposed on the Schnick’s Nervous Breakdown LP. Shaq loved these guys, although their work doesn’t seem to have aged as well as many of their peers (especially after the Schnicks’ Nervous Breakdown LP, where Chip Fu, the Caribbean speed rhymer on the squad, basically decides that he’s Mel Blanc). Nonetheless, this is a must-have party cut in my household, owing largely to the Shaq Diesel version whose horns, drums and pleasantly anxiety-inducing car alarm effect elevate the Schnicks’ cadence to insane degrees. (Also a tasty time capsule: Fun to hear Shaq brag, “Who’s the first pick, me, word is born an’...not Christian Laettner, not Alonzo Mourning”)

14. Mad Lion, “Carpenter”
He of the gravelly, booming Jamaican style started popping up a lot in the same frame as Boogie Down Productions’ KRS-ONE, getting more mileage out of gun checks, death threats and unapologetically badly sung hooks than he had a right to. His album Real Ting made more of a splash, but this banger off of Ghetto Gold & Platinum Respect flies off an absolutely monstrous beat and grimly hilarious George Michael lyric substitution in the second verse. 

Breakup Gaming Society is not responsible for any furniture you throw out of windows while listening to Mad Lion tracks

15. DJ Quik, “Dollaz + Sense”
In one of the best diss tracks of all time, Quik serves up Compton’s Most Wanted’s MC Eiht on a silky slab of G-funk. You can hear the flush and gurgle of Eiht’s street cred going right down the john. The coup de grace: “E-I-H-T, should I continue?/Yeah, you left out the G ‘cause the G ain’t in you.” Toe tag.

16. Frankie Cutlass, “Puerto Rico”
Fuck you if you’re still in you’re seat when this drops and fuck you if you’re not feeling this list.

17. Wu-Tang Clan, “Severe Punishment”
In my opinion, the best track off Wu-Tang Forever, in which the Most Iconic Big Crew in Rap delivers a bloated two-album landmark after a string of legendary solo efforts like Tical and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. The RZA raids a lot of Kung Fu flicks, but these kickoff samples take the cake; it’s menacing and driving and ominous and somehow makes every other track on this huge album look meandering and off the mark. Yes, including “Triumph.” Sorry, but “Triumph” sucks and it’s boring.

18. Sadat X, “The Lump Lump”
Nobody I’ve heard rhymes quite like Derek Murphy. You look at the hordes of awesome MCs across the Golden Era, how many were just lucky enough to drop the right bars on the right track at the right time, because there were at least 20 dudes from their borough who were just as nice, and you appreciate more and more this true American microphone original: hard-edged, cajoling, conversational and chippy, unanswerable to common rhyme schemes. He comes off like the guy in the barber shop who could smack the shit out of you without fear of reprise and has knows more about life than you. “The Lump Lump” is the leadoff on the otherwise so-so Wild Cowboys, but 20 years later, this extended cautionary about the perils of catting still shines from every facet.

19. Da Bush Babees, “Wax”
The clock was ticking on Natives Tongues-style production and rhyming, where your weapons were linguistic and metaphorical and you didn’t have to pose like a neighborhood kingpin to be considered deadly with your craft. The atmosphere of this track is borderline narcotic, with a tiny squeak augmenting the snare, a beautiful two-note keyboard and a snippet of King Ad Rock from “The New Style.” Beautiful track where fierce and funny lyricists dress down the would-be microphone gangsters of the time.

20. Funkdoobiest, “XXX Funk”
Part of the Soul Assassins flotilla in the early ‘90s with Cypress Hill and House of Pain, the Doobiest’s sophomore slab made a step change in sophistication. It’s easy to get a fast start off of Muggs beats, but what happens here is remarkable, especially if you remember the cadence of Son Doobie’s rhyme patterns on Which Doobie UB?, which were sometimes so basic, they were infuriating. Not here, where he mellows his delivery while upping the complexity of his imagery and flow. While a West Coast act, this album draws heavy production inspiration from the previous four years of East Coast sound. Irresistible beat.

Loony of the looniest, the mighty Funkdoobiest

21. Super Cat, “Ghetto Red Hot (Hip Hop Mix)”
You can play around with the original dancehall version if you want, but this is the joint. Full of well-traveled samples, but whoever remixed this made it feel more like a hot, hair-trigger night in the Kingston slums than the original producer did. One of my fave head-bobbers and most hypnotic city driving songs.

22. 2 Live Crew, “Move Somethin’”
Miami Bass still rules. Rudy Ray Moore samples and scratches, filthy rhymes and possibly the hottest bridge in hip hop outside of Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” RIP Fresh Kid Ice, who, with the possible exception of MC Hammer, had one of the weakest pen games and lamest delivery of any major US rapper ever. Pour one out for him anyway.

23. Heavy D feat. Absolutely Fucking Everybody, “Don’t Curse”
Still the #1 crew joint of all time: Pete Rock, CL Smooth, Heavy D (RIP), Grand Puba, Big Daddy Kane, Kool G. Rap, Phife Dawg (RIP) and Q-Tip, all putting their own twist on the theme of making a big party record without dropping any cusswords in their bars. Cue Booker T and the MGs sample and go. A great day in hip hop.

24. Ultramagnetic MCs, “Break North”
Frankly, this whole album (Critical Beatdown) is break-out-the-beers-and-just-play-it-all worthy. I came to it in 2008 and it still gets better every time I hear it. Rapper/producer Ced Gee allegedly apprenticed with BDP’s Scott LaRock (RIP) and applied his newfound chops to...this hyperactive, hard-hitting tableau of freewheeling creative violence. I love “Break North” because the beat is SO DAMN TOUGH. Ced Gee’s verses always get overshadowed by Kool Keith and the way he patiently laces his bizarre rhymes over Ced’s big, big tracks. This album never hit it big, but it’s baked into hip hop’s DNA and everybody knows it.

25. Roxanne Shante, “Go On Girl”
A blistering challenge to the world from the Queen of MCs, propelled by a properly minimal and catchy track. That voice and cadence make it feel like you picked the wrong one to jaw at on the subway platform and now you’re getting roasted in front of your whole squad. Before all the perfunctory, inflatable gun molls du jour, there was Shante. After they are all forgotten, there will be Shante. (She was aligned with the Juice Crew during the Bridge Wars and did a pretty killer diss track of KRS-ONE, too.)

She’s been out there, Queen of MCs, since your man was walkin’ ‘round in mock necks and Lees

26. Digital Underground, “The Way We Swing”
“The Humpty Dance” will forever brand them as a novelty act to the filthy casual, but these dudes were hella fun on the mic and absolute monsters in the studio. Sex Packets was the chief piece of evidence that the West Coast wasn’t all Jheri curls and Uzis; a deep, rich soundscape heavily propelled by Funkadelic samples and a hedonistic, witty spirit. “The Way We Swing” lets Humpty’s alter ego, Shock G, do his (somewhat goofy) warning shot to MCs who don’t take them seriously, all built on licks from “Who Knows” off Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys live LP. If you’re not wide open by the time DJ Fuze’s scratch solo hits, you’re beyond help.

27. Gang Starr, “Code of the Streets”
Sometimes an MC can project invincible authority and intelligence on the mic without being lyrically flashy. That was Guru (RIP). One of your finer Golden Age duos here. Production and turntable legend DJ Premier pairs a catchy string sample with a snapping beat and some entertaining frisson in the form of a high-pitched scratch on the chorus. Like almost everything Guru and Premier did, it’s pure, studiously uncomplicated and wildly effective.

28. Public Enemy, “Shut Em Down (Pete Rock Remix)”
Apocalypse ‘91...The Enemy Strikes Black was the last of a four-album run that had kept PE in the center of the hip hop conversation, but it’s still PE, so we’re talking degrees of awesome here. Not sure if the Bomb Squad was still producing them by the time this platter came out, but whoever shelved their ego and let Pete Rock have a go at reinterpreting “Shut Em Down” deserves a fucking medal. “Pete Rock Remix,” roughly translated, means “Way hotter than your original.”

29. Original Concept, “Charlie Sez”
Despite being on the white-hot Dej Jam imprint and having some built-in star power from Dr. Dre (the East Coast one from Yo! MTV Raps), Original Concept never made much of a splash outside of the true heads. But, as they will remind you on this track, they did have two DJs. An accent cut or a scratch on the chorus? Fuck that. How about we let both of them go off for the WHOLE SONG on sections of Word of Mouth’s “King Kut”? The results speak for themselves.

30. The D.O.C., “Lend Me an Ear”
Dr. Dre (the West Coast one) discovered The D.O.C. in Texas and produced his solo album, No One Can Do It Better, in ‘89. He crushed his vocal chords in a drunk driving accident not long after (and is relegated to ghostwriting duties and croaking over skits in The Chronic), but he can always point to the day that Dre put his vocals over a stack of dynamite, wrapped them in C4, put them on a nuclear warhead, stuffed it all in the trunk of a ‘64 Impala and suicide-bombed it right down your earhole. Dre must have woke up mad the day he mixed this. It’s incredible.

31. Eazy-E, “No More ?’s”
The ultimate testament to the power of production in making a rapper’s name. As outlined in the biopic, Eric Wright was a crack dealer who couldn’t rap worth a shit when N.W.A. formed. Get him in crime reporting/advocacy mode, give it some storytelling structure with a novelty interview format over one of the best Dre tracks of all time? Voila. Masterpiece.

32. Intelligent Hoodlum, “Arrest the President”
This kid (later known as Tragedy Khadafi) was talking about George Herbert Walker Bush, but the sentiment still applies. In boxing they talk about “selling out” in the ring: Taking a risk to land a big blow. Marley Marl crafts a pulse-pounding, stripped-down breakbeat and siren capped by a sample stab; Hoodlum goes for it with all the oxygen, piss and vinegar in his young body: “Al Islam, read the Kuran/Grab the mic and drop bombs.”

The Tragedy Khadafi part comes later

33. A Tribe Called Quest, “We Can Get Down”
Based on the Midnight Marauders tracks that they did videos for and what the algorithms push you to, “Award Tour,” “Oh My God,” and “Electric Relaxation” are all the star efforts of this disc. The algorithms are WRONG. DJs who play these are WRONG. I mean, they’re all fine tracks, but none of them hold a candle to “We Can Get Down.” No, I will not be taking questions.

34. Nice and Smooth, “Hip Hop Junkies”
Stop thinking. Don’t listen at the fucking track. Shut up and party. Greg Nice and Smooth B are in the house and they brought a Partridge Family sample. I love the way Smooth purrs his bars and Greg Nice did whatever rhymed to get the party up, producing dependably entertaining non sequiturs every verse: “I’ll be damned, gag me with a spoon/Who loves Popeye? Alice the Goon.” (I was once at a throwback hipster party in 2008 and requested that the DJ play this and he made a funny little scrunchy face because he was a fucking bitch. You’ll also want “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow” off this platter. As my old rapper friend D.O. once said, 1991 literally wouldn’t exist without these tracks.)

35. Big Daddy Kane, “It’s Hard Being the Kane”
Highly in demand after making his name during his work with Stet and De La, Prince Paul shows up to guest produce tracks for everybody, almost singlehandedly saving the crappy Taste of Chocolate LP with this undeniable party in a can. Even the great Kane’s bag of tricks were feeling a little shopworn by the early ‘90s, but he hits classic form one more time over Prince Paul’s brilliant companion hooks, buildups and breakdowns. Every few measures there’s some minor, flawless new transfer of energy to subtly higher levels of excitement. What a touch he had.

36. King Tee feat. Tha Alkaholiks, “Bus Dat Ass”
The Chronic eclipsed almost everything released about this time. Sure, Dre broke Snoop and defined the West Coast sound for years. But King Tee and DJ Pooh were no slouches, giving Tha Alkaholiks an introductory bow on Tha Triflin’ Album: When a gangster legend gives you a couple guest verses on his LP, you throw lyrical haymakers on every second of mic time and leave it all in the ring, which is precisely what J-Ro, Tash and E-Swift did.

37. Lord Finesse feat. AG, “Back to Back Rhyming”
The Diggin’ in the Crates crew is a wellspring of the most fun, most instinctive, no-bullshit rhyming and beatmaking of the Golden Era. This crew included Big L, Fat Joe, OC, Diamond D, Showbiz & AG, and—my current favorite of the alliance—the supremely self-assured, nasty and charismatic Lord Finesse. Here are Finesse and AG putting on a quick two-verse clinic from Finesse’s ‘90 debut, Funky Technician on the Wild Pitch label.

You don’t need all that other bullshit, Finesse is here now

38. Now Born Click, “Mad Sick”
A fairly recent discovery from following where the Stoli and algorithm take me in the wee hours. Wait, what? Who are these guys? They never even released a full album, but they have tapes going on Discogs for $300? Oh, it’s because it’s pure underground hardcore with precise, boisterous MCing and production to match.

39. Mad Kap, “Da Whole Kit and Kaboodle”
Uptempo, ludic and highly finessed track that captures so much of what made this era of hip hop simultaneously accessible and full of surprises. The builds, drums and sample switchups at key transitions are pleasant shocks and the whole thing—down to the mood projected by the MCs—is just so dang self-assured and disarming. Magic.

40. Leaders of the New School, "Bass is Loaded/Zearocks"
From "T.I.M.E.", Leaders of the New School's second (and I think, final) LP. Lush production and the reason I still shout out MANY STYLES and BRROOK-CHOOK-CHOOK I'M PLAYING SUPER NINTENDO while I'm making breakfast for no reason at all. Tagging "Zearocks" on to this because it's more than the usual producer-challenge interstitial: Banging snare, killer horn sample and Public Enemy snippet refashioned to announce late glory of a high-voltage crew that would never be quite the same again.

41. Jay-Z, "Reservoir Dogs"
Became my #2 all-time crew joint behind "Don't Curse" after two listens. The swagger. The wordplay. The firepower. The utter contempt for anybody else who even claims to be on the chessboard. If this song were a scene from a movie, it would be the slo-mo part where nine dudes pull heat from Italian jackets striding over marble floors.

42. MC Lyte, "Shut the Eff Up! (Hoe)" 
Nothing focuses an MC so much as a) having a story to tell or b) an antagonist to dismantle. Fun track that refuses to economize; the measures keep going as long as Lyte had something to say, which was a lot. "I sensed it, predicted it, knew it would happen/You'd plop your fat ass on the scene and start rappin.'" You can tell Lyte and Milk D were having a lot of fun with this.

She is the Lyte and you are just paper thin

43. "I Own America, Pt. 1," Slick Rick
He of the eye patch and imperial drip, he of the singular style: lilting, louche delivery; pornographic imagination, literary scene-sketching and, lest you think he's soft, one of the sharpest pens in the game when it sensed a pretender's jugular in the room. Surgical savagery from The Ruler, one of the best MCs of all time. (Somebody in some magazine said one of the rhymes on this track was one of the year's worst, but why that one? In '88, he said he was going to let his dog nail your wife if you give him trouble, so I'm not seeing anything egregious here.)

44. Kool Moe Dee, "I Go to Work"
LL made fun of his old-school pedigree and wraparound shades, but Kool Moe puts on a passionate seminar here — metaphors, internal rhymes, switching up schemes — over a big, dramatic track. Heard this for the first time decades ago and I still can't get enough of it. Each verse leads a simile for a different trade or sport, and the way he leads off the architect section is worth the price of admission alone.

45. Beatnuts, "Get Funky"
The Nuts became more prominent for their studio work and collabs a few years after this, but the debut Street Level LP will always be their magnum opus, in my view: this album sets one of the largest jewels, production-wise, into the big-snare-and-a-jazz-hook era with their own loose, thuggish tapestry of sound. JuJu also was underrated as a rhyme writer. This and "Fried Chicken" are the primary pieces of evidence.

46. Brand Nubian, "Steal Ya Ho"
Off In God We Trust, the full-length LP that Jamar and X did after Puba went off to do his own thing. Highlighting this one because it's such a great example of Sadat X's craft and style, as he taunts, teases and threatens all the unfortunate cuckolds in towns where the Nubians roamed. A singular manifesto of the hip hop Lothario.

They don’t care if your man’s blood boil, ‘cause they know a place with some nice, soft soil

47. Naughty By Nature, "Hot Potato"
I don't hear Treach mentioned enough when people are recounting the Great Golden Era MCs, because he was one, keeping it in fifth gear through an entire album and bringing along Mr. Freddie Foxxx aka Bumpy Knuckles himself for a tag-team mic beatdown whose menace and verve knock your teeth right down your windpipe.

48. Camp Lo, "Coolie High"
Uptown Saturday Night feels like one of those divine manifestations that slips into sight like a golden-scaled fish and leaves you in wonderment; Camp Lo never made much of a splash thereafter, but if I were one of the mic or mixboard team who was involved with this, I could go to the afterlife content with knowing I did one thing this perfect: a luminous tableau of creative cadences that takes you to some sort of otherworldly bootlegger conference/Player's Ball in a nightclub on a plane of existence where it's eternally 1:30 a.m. and people are still rolling in freshly dipped for the night.

49. Queen Latifah feat. Monie Love, “Ladies First (The Crazy Extended 45 King Remix)”
The intro melodic layering and buildup makes this one the version for highly danceable boasting and uplift from Latifah’s debut, All Hail the Queen. Monie Love murders her guest verses, which seals the deal.

50. "Disk and Dat," Kwest Tha Madd Ladd
Another brilliant artist partially doomed by late release/label bullshit. "101 Things To Do When I'm With Your Girl" is probably the most well-known, but I played the hell out of this one, too, with its rollicking drums/keyboard sample and time-capsule tribute to the studio tools and processes that made the tracks. I don't know if Eminem ever listed him as an influence, but listening to this, it seems he owes Kwest a debt: hyperactive, troubled and funny microphone scamp from around the way, alike in spirit and cadence. (Eminem and Kwest actually appeared on a track called “5 Star Generals” way back, and Kwest blew everybody out of the water.)