Dwelling Solo RPG Session 7: The Gehenna Task List

This part of the story was generated from the Conjure prompt in the Basement scene from Dwelling, a solo journaling RPG about facing spirits and memories in a haunted house. The previous installment detailed the narrator’s memories from a prompt in the same room; you can listen to that one here.

BASEMENT

Conjure: The basement is bathed in a sickly red glow. Everything I imagined from the most fear drenched moments of my childhood are summoned here in the basement around me. Bodies, forms, beings etched into shadow, and wall, floor, and even the red light that is spreading through the basement.

They seem to mill around and at the same time not move at all: In the naming sounds of this hell, they are called CORdy, Derek, and molmolmolmolmolRIC, but also sometimes they are called Krabeltst or Elemena-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh — or maybe these are simply other words they use often.

In the light of other places they would be handsome protectors or kids who could sell you something useful at a fair price, but here they will, with the same charming half-interest as in the other lights, help themselves to the marrow. CORDeeee or is it molmolmolmolmolRIC are in charge of a great camera rig, which they move around as they banter.

The rig is like a bulbous scepter of fused seeing devices with a single metal stalk and tripod, lenses of all sizes jutting out. It is not always clear who is holding or moving this array. They seem to understand not only which way it’s supposed to point, but that whatever it captures will not cloud one happy afternoon on patios full of the handsome and ravenous.

They don’t bother to issue direction or let me in on the script; they have already won in the last scene under the light of other worlds, I think. There are old Minolta 35mms and many telephotos, hooded security cams and phone screens; the Gordian recesses of their cabling glisten with fluids.  

There are women also — maybe three, maybe four — called Mllllghean, and gribn and Melanimanianuhnuhnuh. These Friday casuals, they gather and chatter as producers or directors would with extras in earshot. It doesn’t matter if the help hears the plan. What are they going to do?

Their overlapping chatter is a train of rushing cuneiform cars at the edge of the bed…there is a bed now, by the way — an immense bed set violently against what I think the basement should allow. 

I am naked under the comforter, the top edge of it arched enough to see the personnel. I am trying to burrow into the bedding, but the edges of it give with the room’s breath and the smallest gap, though a body’s length away, jolts my legs into fits of weak pedaling motions.

Some of the women stand, some sit at the edge of the bed as they burble to each other in the dream tongue. Simultaneously I want to be joined under there or left unseen, but in their talk, gales of oblique assignments batter me, planting false memories of emails or spreadsheets stacked with barked orders in the same unforgiving dialect. 

I am being transmitted directions in the ur-language of every deadline, the soundbed of every two-minute span before you’re three minutes late — of hallways you failed to navigate in buildings where you didn’t belong.

The senseless instructions keep coming. Gribn and Mllllghean keep laughing and I want them to know I need either rest or touch, either will do. The boys reposition their rig for the fourth time, the air pressurized with the hatred of its seeing. I writhe again in the void of the blanket that refuses to cover or hide me. 

I never noticed the small hinged door of the soot trap nor knew there was a wood furnace down here; there are several of these tin doors now set into the brick at irregular spacing, and Melanimanianuhnuhnuh or one of the others goes to one of the doors every so often, not breaking a sentence, and admits another rust-colored bird from a new door, which flaps out with a puff of ash and alights near my pillows.

They have rust eyes and black, rectangular pupils and they, too, wait for me to execute instructions. They arrive constantly.

Sleep, God give me sleep, one bundle pinched at the edges against the vapor of a poison moon or give me one body to hold that muffles this language forever. One cuppable butt in the night would be the rondure of one perfect word in the manifold unasked questions of the savior’s tongue.

God, give me rest. 

The instructions keep coming. 

Somewhere diagonal and down from my heels, I feel a rush of cold as the bottom corner of the comforter is raised again.

Next: Back to the First Floor

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Plucky Indie TTRPGs You Could Be Playing Instead of D&D: A Curated Interview Series

Metal Queens ov Skull Mountain TTRPG: Thrash Storytelling With a Simple Chord Structure

With its simple chord structure designed to go fast, Metal Queens ov Skull Mountain promises a story- and feat-centered combat crescendo in the wastes surrounding the mountain where your Metal Queens preside.

Breakup Gaming Society hops on the line with Walt and learns how, with the help of your GM (Demon Queen) and the game’s straight-ahead d20 system, you’re upping your Thrash skills in no time and burning your name into the scroll of legends.

Hit play below for our 20-minute chat about this flexible gig that’s just as metal as you can make it.

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Check out other indie TTRPG reccos from our series of talks with Walt.

Professor Phelyx’s Tarot: A Slight Retelling of the Deck’s Magical Story

My pal Professor Phelyx — emcee, magician, mentalist, artist, aesthete-at-large — has likely popped onto a stage in front of you, especially if you live in Denver. I caught back up with him and learned he’s already 500+ hours in on the creation of his own tarot deck.

I wanted to know why, as almost anything this urbane dude puts his mind to is worth a gander.

He talked to me about why he felt the need to hand-make a woodblock-style tarot mod that nods to his deep-dive into his German lineage and tarot’s historical importance as a storytelling game for everyday folk.

Hit play, learn some cool history, and let The Prof show you his next painstaking trick…

Scrabble Session Report: The Co-op Aspect of Matches with The Moms

I ate some fine food with the ‘rents in Taos last September. Tagged along with them for a day trip to Ojo Caliente, their favorite self-care amusement park.

When you’re a nice person such as The Moms is, you generate all kinds of cool opportunities in the Denver Nice Old Person Barter Economy. She spent a whole day teaching somebody how to can food at home. They kicked her back a free stay in a beautiful house in Taos.

The house had a name, like estates do. It was so pretty it hurt, and so was the street where it sat, dozing in inauspicious good taste under its dome of sweet air and decades of fastidious zoning. There was a block’s worth of desert meadow across the lane. Cars passed rarely and at reverent speeds when they did.

Inside, we stole away to sleep when we liked, sometimes gathering to read or scroll at the central table. No bigger decisions here than the timing of coffee, the composition of snack plates — the unforced overlap of the domestic rhythms of two octogenarians and their middle-aged son.

The last evening included a game of Scrabble, which The Moms always asks for when I see her and which I usually manage to dodge because I’m a finicky twat. But by then the neighborhood and the company had loosened me up. I’d have eaten kibble out of a stranger’s unwashed hand.

She cleared the table while my stepdad scrolled on his iPad and listened to 20th Century composers. It was a magnetic travel set, its longest journey taken through two generations of her family. I will likely end up with it some day. Every tile was still there.

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The action and the company were good. I recognized in her my approach to the game: Competitive, but leavened with the pure delight of words. Both of us were prone to unwise plays that open up parts of the board to the opponent because the word we found was too pretty not to line up.

That kind of thing would never fly with her brother, who has one of those Scrabble dictionaries that lets you smash your opponent to their knees with two- and three-letter words that all sound like rocks.

He always played this way. During my visits to Chicago as a boy, he’d play his 3M Bookshelf Games with me when he was in med school, no quarter given. “The object of the game,” he would always say with the purr of a deadpan emcee, “is to win. The winner — that’s me —…” Then he’d describe the game and beat me soundly.

Those 3M games — as well as my grandmother’s 1980s Genus Edition of Trivial Pursuit — are in my care now. It’s not written down in any of the succession docs that sit in a plastic binder back in Starkville, but I assume I’ll be the keeper of Mom’s travel Scrabble set, providing I do her the courtesy of staying on the right side of the dirt longer than she does.

Neither of us played to lose, but there was a broader concord informing the match: To prod sparks from the hidden vaults of language and admire them together. The beauty of Scrabble — or any good trivia or word game — reminded me that we’re all water bugs skating on the black pools of the self. What’s down there?

Looking for a midgame play, I found the word “griot” was down there. I couldn’t remember the definition or how I came by it, this emissary from the sleeping water of the mind.

I mostly managed to keep pace with her, but I got the bad end of two of the game’s three challenges. The lost turns were the game’s winning margin.

***

A few summers ago I woke up with a sore back and hamstrings and a plangent, tentacled hangover because I’d spent the late evening and early morning, drunk as a lord, standing bent over my kitchen counter yelling into my laptop and trading vintage Trivial Pursuit questions with an equally drunken high school friend.

I got a question about which two actors refused their Oscars in the ‘70s. He gave me an astonishingly long time to get it. He gloats when we wins — once he did it so bad I hung up on him — but he was rooting for me on this one.

I somehow knew that one had to be Marlon Brando because he was cagey and artistic. I strained until the other one arrived: “It was George C. Scott,” I said after several minutes of plumbing…I don’t know. It seemed beyond reasoning, beyond memory. Magical alcoholic treasure hunt. The brain is a protean dungeon map with endless replayability. He huzzahed as if the answer were his own.

***

After The Moms packed the set back into the drawstring bag, her imploring post-game question IDed the real opponent at the table: the doldrums of forgetting.

“I need to ask you a question,” she said. I braced for unwanted family revelation. “Did you let me win? Did I do that on my own?”

She’s sensitive to her growing memory gaps, vigilant to slippage. I was happy to tell her I’d played at my peak and lost straight up.

Back to a theme I touched on while learning Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: I’m a neurotic dude, and five years in the country living solo has brought me all the best and worst of my lifelong drive for emotional autonomy and time un-crimped by the desires or impressions other people have of the world, which are torture when not taken in careful bites.

At the best: This buys me the time I need to be possessed totally by what is worthy, thereby erasing time. At the worst: I fail to recognize the midpoint where a version of this joy can be found with others, and judge others ungenerously for their clumsiness in recognizing the melodies of my private hymnal.

I wanted to report the final score in this segment, so I asked her to text me the outcome, which I know she wrote down.

That she keeps forgetting.

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Trivial Pursuit is an excellent trivia question set welded to an unnecessary board.

Final Girl: A Knock at the Door (Ava Earns Her Stripes)

Final Girl: A Knock at the Door - If you’re having a lakeside get-together this summer and you think the neighbors might get out of hand, invite Ava, she’ll handle it.

A scant four, maybe five, turns in to my first game of Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: Ava, our hero, is cornered in the garage of Wingard Cottage as Trish, Zeke, and Baghead converge on her. The first blow halves her health and makes her forget what kind of thing she was trying to fashion from the junk in there.

It hardly matters now. It’s a killers’ moon up there tonight.

What could have stopped this tide? Before they turned their exclusive attention to Ava, the three Intruders cleared out the rest of the cottage like a six-legged thresher.

They drew the Coordinated Attack Dark Power, which put them on the march every turn.

They drew the Amphetamines Dark Power.

And The Outsider — a special victim meeple summoned by the first action card — all but sealed it. 

It felt like what might have happened if the Manson family studied 100 hours of special forces breach-and-clear videos on YouTube. It’s an utter rout: So sudden, so rude, so total, that I can only laugh in admiration. After all, this is what I came here for.

This is my second trip through the rooms of a Final Girl location. 

The first was Final Girl: Madness in the Dark, based on the Silent Hill console franchise. I tilted with that beast something like 15 times before getting my first victory against Wolfe Asylum’s Ratchet Lady and her minions.

I raged against it for weeks. What kept me in it? I was hypnotized by its kaleidoscope of candy components, evocative scene-making, the coruscating variety of its cruelty, the rollercoaster dosages of choice and chance, the deadpan jokes it writes in human fluids.

I gave my buddy Fritz a few hits of the action at Wolfe Asylum one night last summer and he had his own core box and first movie — Killer from Tomorrow — within weeks. “The worst loss at Final Girl,” he texted me recently, “is infinitely more interesting than a month of any streaming service.”

His enthusiasm arced back to me and got me shopping a new challenge from Van Ryder Games’ ever-expanding lineup of exquisite torture devices. I finally opted for A Knock at the Door because I liked the twist: Fending off three killers at once, with the option to rig up grisly homemade weapons with stuff you find around the house.

I finally remember what Ava was thinking about in that first game before her vision flipped to permanent static: She was thinking about making an Obliterator — a two-hander that Ava can build if she collects wood, rope, discarded tools, and nails.

But to do that, you need time and composure and the ability to recalculate opportunities and threats faster than the three Intruders can julienne all your pals like fresh onions.

Finding a substantial weapon while you hustle a victim or two out of one of the board’s exit spots is usually a solid opening sequence, but the appearance of The Outsider derails me. Ava burns a hellacious pile of action cards getting to the bedroom where The Outsider was moping.

It’s not until I move her there that I realize the room has no western or southern exits, so Ava has to drag them back out along the same route. 

Where were the clean extraction drills I seemed to run so well in Wolfe Asylum? The zones outside the cottage soak up action cards like thirsty desert soil. One of the Intruders catches up with Ava and The Outsider just as they clear the house, simplifying the problem by hacking The Outsider to bits in front of her.

By this time the board is on full boil and the first game is lost.

I picture a party banner loosening at one end in a room full of the slain. You can just make out the text before it folds over on itself: WELCOME BACK FUCKER.

***

My first day of play grinds to a halt because something doesn’t make sense about the pace at which the Intruders tore through that map. It feels unfair even by Final Girl’s callous standards.

I hunt down every thread I can find about the Coordinated Attack card. None of the discussions plainly address this problem I’m seeing with the word “effect” as it appears in the scenario-specific rules and on the Terror card itself.

Several times that day I try to become a more practical player: The instinctual ruling is probably right, I tell myself. The sensible thing is to run with it. But why is the operational language not lining up? During the afternoon I think myself into a shadow world.

I describe the problem on Reddit. On BoardGameGeek. To my friend Dave over at Dude! Take Your Turn. I got so desperate for answers in between waiting for forum responses that I even ask Sam Altman’s world-burning machine. 

It gives me a long explanation of why my bent-up conclusion about the card language is correct, and why I can play the game incorrectly if I really feel like it. 

“Some players,” it notes, also interpret this card in a more forgiving way. I keel sideways out of my chair when I realize it is using my own question threads from that day to justify the ruling. Sweet Mother of God, please watch over the souls of the lonely children in the clutches of this trillion-dollar imbecile.

At this point of the day-long wrestling match, my inability to figure out the game appears in a continuum with both everything I’ve failed at, ever, and everything that’s objectively fractured in the world. This is a reminder to put a permanent asterisk over everything your host says about board games. He’s not entirely well.

My question was valid in the semantic sense. But it had nothing to do with the law as applied. The toughest part of the map was in my head. Like Dave told me via email: “Don’t make it tougher than it already is! LOL.”

I was too young to remember how the conversation started, but I remember my Dad — who could also build mental traps out of anything he found — telling me in the cab of the truck one day on the way to town: “Warrens do it the hard way.”

I heard it hopefully, like it meant we were a tough breed.

But his jokes were warnings for the decades to come.

***

Fortunately the Warren family inheritance also includes a tendency to fixation and addiction. Which begets repetition. Which begets improvement.

Ava charges back into Wingard Cottage at least six more times over the next few days. She weathers several ugly misfires that aren’t worth playing past the fourth turn. But the facts of the new terrain and its adversaries start to blend with known best practices.

The contests get a lot less lopsided. I start to internalize the new rules, settle down and bite back. On the fourth or fifth game, Ava gets the whole “arts and crafts” thing well enough to make a spiked bat.

That starts off with a “super turn” tactic that I picked up online when I was learning Madness in the Dark.

Back to personal psychology here: I’m an overly timid player who likes to explore and experiment with a certain set of blinders on. You know the axiom, “Scared money don’t make none?” 

I’m a scarcity thinker who doesn’t see creative strategies in the card and action economy, especially when the game’s interlocking Horror Track, Bloodlust Track and Terror Deck start beating me up. Under these conditions, giving up something highly valuable to get something that’s even more valuable just doesn’t appear in my brain’s default pulldown menu. This urge is well-documented in psychological studies of the poor.

When I was first learning the Final Girl action steps, in my mind, a small hand of good cards had to work because each one felt precious to the little success story I’d written in my head, and when that story didn’t happen, the part of my brain that scans for creative tactical opportunities simply checked the fuck out.

The “super turn” concept was extremely counterintuitive to me. The person who posted about this tactic suggested that instead of bleeding out your first few small hands with must-make rolls, you just focus on reducing the Horror Track so by the time you get a bonus third die, you have a massive hand that you can execute almost at will — which works even better if you lead off the super turn by forcing a double success with the Improvise action. 

You just have to tell your brain it’s OK to sweat out a few turns where you get little done, which the game’s constant pressure tricks players like me into not thinking about.

I was too proud to use this tactic at first because it felt like I was shortcutting to success. Instead of making delphic quips, Pops would have served me better by telling me it’s OK to raise your hand for help when you’re good and stuck.

So on that fourth or fifth game, with an extra die and a string of small actions at reach, Ava strolls into the shed, calmly assembles a spiked bat, walks out of the shed and demolishes her first Intruder without breaking a sweat.

It is late in the game and she’s already taken damage, so I use another trick I learned during pitched battles with the Ratchet Lady in Wolfe Asylum.

Ava starts redlining. 

If your Horror Track is well under control, you get three dice for skill checks. Get down to one health, and you add a fourth adrenaline die, which makes you a dangerous wounded target.

This way you can goad your antagonist by lingering in the same room as them, looking beaten and pulpy, then pop a Retaliate card on ‘em, alternated with any attack cards you have at hand. The game breaks wide open. Ava wallops Trish and Zeke into a vapor with that bat. A Terror card effect sends Baghead right to Ava’s space the very next turn.

“Ohhh Baghead,” I say with a note of pity. “You picked the right one.” The weight of all those setup plays makes the dice feel like incipient thunder in my hand. All I have to do is throw the bolt from the high ground.

Except I roll a 1-1-1-4 on my Retaliate roll. I don’t even have the strength to get mad. I stare at the dice for 15 seconds, then reset the game. 

Final Girl: A Knock at the Door - Call the goddamn coroner, got three stiffs for you courtesy of Ava’s newfound sangfroid.

The next game, I win my first contest in a blowout. I’m handed a magical opening sequence in the first few cards: a shotgun, components to build snare traps, and the Home Security event. Only a fool could squander a setup that juicy.

Between the snares, shotgun harassment, and the home security system, the Intruders can’t get into the house. Eleven victims get to eat Fiddle Faddle inside and laugh while Ava walks the home invaders down and sorts them out.

Et voila: I get to experience one of the Best Moments in Board Gaming, right up there with the castillo reveal in El Grande and the initial plane placement step of a Thunderbolt Apache Leader mission. I get to open the little envelope from the box. That little envelope that you can only open when your character survives a map for the first time.

Inside there’s Ava’s Spiked Bat and Porcupine, a baseball bat/garbage can lid combo, bristling with tenpenny nails. And it’s just a regular item that can be found with a search, you don’t even have to craft anything on the fly. That’s a sonafabitch right there — and perfect for the 2026 grad in your life. I’m not saying Ava has mastered this scenario, but she seems well over her freshman jitters.

There’s a 100% chance I set this up again first thing in the morning. The three-killer problem is vexing and chewy, the weapon-forging system is starting to show its charms. A big thing this game has going for it is that even when the tactical advantage of something isn’t obvious, you’re regaled with gobs of theme until insight catches up.

The event and item variety are still novel enough to bring regular surprises and shocks: I couldn’t believe starting my first game with Booby Trap, the event card that panics all the victims, and by the way, the outside of the house is booby trapped and you’re starting the game with a potential die-off even before you’ve plotted one turn. The next game, the neighbor special victim appeared, chatting everybody up in the living room with those boat keys in his pocket and the potential rush of safely seeing off a jackpot of victims from the lakefront.

Because exploration and situational flavor gradients are as important to me as “solving” the game, I know I can spend the next few weeks dashing to every corner and implication of this new batch of items, events, and tactics.

And after that? My first opportunity to “mix and match.” 

Now that I’m in the two-movie club, I can start remixing locations and killers: What happens when I drop The Ratchet Lady from Madness in the Dark into Wingard Cottage? There are many more firsts waiting for me this year.

How do my two titles stand up against the rest of the Final Girl collection in terms of balanced challenge and system design? It’s unlikely that I’ll find out anytime soon. 

The two boxes I have will keep me titillated for months. Picture a line graph in the shape of a long-sloped mountain, with the apex representing “getting it”: The long downslope is as delicious and leisurely as the climb is aggravating and painful.

From the high view, everything that can be said about Knock at the Door can be said about Madness in the Dark: It’s fussy, obstreperous, clever and rousing.

Each of these little boxes is a universe that I love to wind up again and again as they sputter, confound and explode — each time in a subtly different pattern. Like a lava lamp filled with chases and stabbings.

All these qualities make the Final Girl series the biggest “genre-breaker” I’ve experienced in years. 

Horror doesn’t particularly interest me as a genre. 

Plus I usually shun expansions or anything that has the whiff of subscription lock-in. 

But I heard it was good, I wanted something different in the diet, and on that day I was at a proper game shop I knew I wasn’t going to be near again for several months, so I grabbed it.

Now it’s grabbed me. In a death grip of fun. What’s gonna happen next? What new tactical bank shots can I come up with in situations I would have considered beyond hope four games ago?

I’m gonna find out again. And again. And again. And again….

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I got a buddy addicted to Final Girl and interviewed him about it.

Final Girl: A Knock at the Door’s First Turn is a Brutal Reunion With This System

Final Girl: A Knock at the Door - The Grad Party setup, with The Outsider (white meeple) hanging out in the bathroom. Trying to extract that victim before the trio of bastards at the bottom got to them cost Ava everything.

A scant four, maybe five, turns in to my first game of Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: Ava, our hero, is cornered in the garage of Wingard Cottage as all three intruders converge. The first blow reduces her health to less than half and she’s got no way to slow them down.

“Boy, I can’t wait to hit pause on SETI and get back into some Ameritrash!” Be careful what you wish for, asshole. It’s like the two-dozen-plus plays I logged with the Madness in the Dark movie meant nothing.

The trio of killers completely overwhelmed the map, killing all but two of the cottage’s innocent victims in a merry dash through the cottage driven by their early acquisition of the Coordinated Attack Dark Power — and amphetamines, which are handy for syncing a room-to-room murder spree, I’m told.

On top of this, my event card brought out a special victim called The Outsider. The killers are programmed to kill their way to this victim in a straight line. I was trying to get The Outsider off the map for my first sequence of plays, but one of the killers bum-rushed the room and slabbed them right in front of me. A poignant early setback.

Outside of saving two victims, the only thing Ava achieved was finding some discarded tools — which eventually could have been crafted into some cool weapons or traps, but that would have taken more time.

Final Girl: A Knock at the Door is based on The Strangers home invasion movie franchise. Emphasis on invasion, apparently. My first play gave me flashbacks of those nature films where a few hornets clear out a whole hive of bees in a few minutes.

Ever since I got my buddy Fritz hooked on Final Girl last year, I’ve been slowly shopping this runaway hit’s constantly expanding lineup of maps and villains: I finally opted for Knock at the Door because I liked this one’s twist. You have to thwart three killers at once with the option to rig up grisly homemade weapons from stuff you find around the house.

In my first setup of cards, it looked like I had the chance to eventually craft a thingamajig called The Obliterator. I’ve always wanted an Obliterator. Maybe next game.

So here we are again, back in the stew of Final Girl’s pressurized action, its intimate use of tropes to create variety, its humor and sudden collapses.

I reset the game immediately after Ava tapped out and expect to play several more times before Episode 113 (releasing end of March), where I promise you a fuller picture of my second dive into this franchise.

UPDATE: Several games later, I am handed a pile of gifts: the Security System event card back to back with the Battle Ready event card, which netted Ava a shotgun that she used twice on Zeke. He lived, but was susceptible to a polishing-off with a Weak Attack card. Even the Terror cards were helping: One produced three victims in the Boathouse, where Ava was already hefting her newfound bat.

The good breaks didn’t stop there: Ava had the ingredients to fashion snares. For several turns, the Intruders couldn’t get into the house and quickly exhausted targets outside of the house. That left them and Ava, her bat, and a no-nonsense alternating sequence of Furious Strike/Retaliate plays. There were 11 victims inside the house eating Fiddle Faddle and moving window to window as Ava mauled Trish, Zeke, and Baghead one by one.

What else happened? And how did this franchise bypass all my usual resistance to games with lots of expansions/constant releases?

Hear that story in Episode 113.

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I got a buddy addicted to Final Girl and interviewed him about it.

Track of the Week Extended Remix: Tim’s Whole List of Hip Hop Suggestions

In Episode 112 I talked with my UK pal Tim Sismey about a track he recommended, which I loved: “Cordless Mics at 20 Paces” by DJ Skitz feat. Phi-Life Cypher.

This was occasion for him to spend time digging through a pile of things he hadn’t thought about or played for a long time.

Here’s Tim chatting about the UK scene and his adolescent path to hip hop addiction:

In the course of digging through tracks, he came up with a whole raft of gems that we couldn’t squeeze into the Track of the Week segment.

They fit here. Mucho gusto.

Collapsed Lung ‎– Down With The Plaid Fad (XXLarge)

Blackalicious - Rhymes for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind

Killah Priest - Moanin' (Ft. Killa Sin)

Youngblood Brass Band - Avalanche

Company Flow - The Fire In Which You Burn

Grand Agent - Every Five Minutes

Vast Aire feat. Diverse - Big Game

C-Rayz Walz - Buck 80

Prefuse 73 feat. MF DOOM & Aesop Rock - Black List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lace your Timbs up for this one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

NINJA BORG RPG Session: Kill Cheap Trick Live at Budokan

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

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

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

The complete audio of this event is below.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what’s up for grabs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grumpy Spider Games’ Rucksack

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

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

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

Long Tail Games’ Tiny Tome 2

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

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

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

Let’s flip to a couple pages here…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you go. Compact, dangerous, and wry.

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

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

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

How to Win These Charmers: Rules and Conditions

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

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

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

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

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

Crate Digging: February 2026 (YouTube Music Edition)

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

Dave Lombardo -- War Ensemble -- Yankee Stadium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Fantasy Flight Games Golden Era: A Personal Retrospective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arkham Horror’s Sister Mary investigator card: You better light another six candles, lady

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arkham Horror 2nd Edition Firsts

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

Matt Thrower Shares His First Fantasy Flight Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tannhaüser Firsts

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

Next: Chaos in the Old World

Matt Thrower Christens His Copy of Twilight Imperium

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

Kenny Katayama’s FFG Throwback Faves

In Episode 112, Kenny Katayama (Shelf Stable) rewound his broad experience with Fantasy Flight’s LCGs. In this bonus excerpt the scope expands to Battlestar Galactica,, Letters from Whitechapel, Fury of Dracula and more…

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UPDATE: Chaos in the Old World and the Wages of Ruin
Chaos in the Old World could have singlehandedly ruined gaming for me for years: Not before or since have I experienced a four-seater — or a quartet of players like the one we had — where we all learned together, got good together, and created such well-matched duels.

I didn’t realize that by the time I’d finally gotten good at playing Nurgle, the Plague God, the group would be done. I still remember the night: Bombed out of our gourds after a good meal at a restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking one of the Portland’s rivers at dusk. We had them clear the table, kept ordering drinks and set the board up on the white tablecloth. The staff were mystified.

During the home stretch of that game, I saw a combo in Nurgle’s Power Cards that I’d never seen before. I usually shied away from because it was the most expensive to play: The Stench of Death. I used it to sprint past everybody at the critical moment.

Barring miracles, it was the last time I’ll share a table with those three people again. Nurgle had a card for that, too: All Things Decay.

Chaos in the Old World: A reunion in Vegas, way off-strip and running low on strategy juice.

Chaos in the Old World: The Basics and a Kind of Review

In case you’re asking, “Who the hell is Nurgle?”

Nurgle is one of the four Ruinous Powers from the Warhammer universe — a fixture both in the fantasy and futuristic versions. He’s a jolly sort who likes covering the world in diseases. But his earthly ambitions often clash with the other Ruinous Powers: Khorne, the Blood God; Slaanesh, The Prince of Pleasure; and Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways.

Chaos in the Old World takes place in the Warhammer fantasy universe. In this Eric Lang masterpiece, everything in the world of humans is about to simultaneously become a target for demonic corruption and subject to massive collateral damage as this quartet of rivals lock in an asymmetrical duke-em-out. Cities will burn. The chanting of cultists and the howls of the displaced will be heard from the smallest hamlet to the tallest towers in the land. Vicious, grasping entertainers will rise to positions of authority.

Nurgle, Khorne, Slaanesh and Tzeentch are all in a race to corrupt the kingdoms on the map and hit one of two victory conditions: Have the most points on the Victory Point track or be the first to reach the last notch on a separate dashboard containing your demon god’s Threat Dial.

Across the map are all the kingdoms of humans. A north-south strip of juicy holdings offers the most points for corruption, but adjoining areas dangle the promise of smaller rewards for less hotly contested ground. 

Each turn you get an allotment of points that you spend round-robin on either dispatching figures to the map (Cultists and Demons) or playing action cards into one of the kingdom areas. Each incremental commitment forces you to recalculate as your opponents commit muscle and magic to their target zones. Are they feinting, simply interfering, or about to arrive in force?

This is where the asymmetrical aspect and the puzzle of opportunity cost replicates the dimensions of this colossal battle inside your head: Each player has different tricks at their disposal. Khorne, who just needs a constant flow of blood to feel satisfied, can simply try to spread his Bloodthirster demons around and use his power cards to increase the likelihood of head-cracking.

Tzeentch’s troops are mostly unremarkable, but he can shower the board with low-cost power cards that don’t look like they’re doing much…until the end run when you realize they’ve spirited high-scoring Warpstones out of your reach and built themselves an engine.

Slaanesh and Nurgle have ways to make combat unattractive (or impossible) so they can degrade kingdoms, keep their utility figures alive, and tilt an ailing region their way as the whole kingdom goes down in a rolling curtain of prismatic warpflame.

But only a total of two Power Cards can be played into a single region on any given turn. Combine this with how the board forces you together, the surprises in the event deck, and all the ways there are to calculate and shave advantage in each kingdom, and you’ve got a grade-A brain burner on your hand. If you’re prone to making reactive decisions under pressure in a medium-length strategy game you’ll find yourself overwhelmed.

As an additional wrinkle, when a human kingdom falls, it gets scored at the end of a round and then becomes worthless. How many of your figures are stranded there doing nothing? Moving them takes points, so you have to play for overall position constantly.

This is all even harder when you don’t play the game correctly.

I took Nurgle’s chair in our early games. And never won. Ever. I was never even in the running during the home stretch. It’s one of the few times I started looking up strategy discussions because this seemed off. Nothing I tried changed the outcome. 

It wasn’t until we’d been playing it for months that I realized we were advancing the Threat Dials too quickly, guaranteeing that Nurgle — who makes a lot of ground on the VP track in the later parts of the game — would never win.

I stayed on Nurgle’s throne for the next several years. Sometimes we’d talk about randomizing the roles, but we always settled back into our regular perches. There was passing silly talk about the expansion that added a fifth player (The Skaven), but we needed that like The Clash needed a saxophonist.

So we got about to playing it right and found an arena whose familiarity, and even late surprises, kept us bound in Chaos even after Jay and Becca moved to Portland. They came to meet us in Vegas and CitOW came along. It came to Portland for our final match, too. They were the kind of trips where you’d decide which outfit you were going to wear a second day so you could cram one more game into the duffel.

Chaos in the Old World would usually come out once before breakfast and on another evening at least, after a day of foraging and tippling in all the neighborhoods we crossed. 

After I moved out of the house, things lightened up a bit between my wife and I. The only thing I cared about keeping at the time were my clothes, books, and games. Before I cleaned out my former home’s game shelf, I asked her if there were any titles she wanted to keep. 

She chose well: Fury of Dracula, Cyclades, Merchants and Marauders, and Chaos in the Old World all remained with her, with its taped-up corner and Cultist figures. Most of the finials on their staffs were snapped off and littering the bottom of the box.

I went mad the following summer and bought a heap in Starkville during COVID summer, riot summer, wildfire smoke making it impossible to keep the sustaining habit of walks. During the warm months I went on benders twice a week and layered in other chemicals as the position of the moon indicated.

I packed something dangerous down there with me: The fantasy that a table like that would ever happen again. At first I thought it would be different if I just owned the box again. It belonged with me because soon I would have three people who would recreate these duels. At this time I also thought I would be able to scrape one of the derelicts on the property’s many lots and put a container house in there for guests. What I did instead was go broke and watch the southerly winds — sometimes holding at 25 m.p.h. and gusting higher for days — peel it like an onion.

Holding onto that notion stunted me, embittered me against all I met. I still owned several dozen thrilling games, but you can’t open a box and soul-transfer the old days into new friends. Compared to those laughter-filled brawls in the Old World, sessions down here didn’t even feel like games. I became impatient, bored with all, withdrew from the rhythms of the town, found an equal but categorically different joy in long nights of solo play, which was a kind of tabula rasa, unfettered by the freight of my bitterness and fantasy.

You often live your fantasy, but don’t recognize it at the time; Chaos in the Old World spread out on a white tablecloth on a beautiful summer night in Portland, triumphant and glutted, about to lose everyone else for good.

Chaos in the Old World is famously out of print and not coming back. A review seems paltry. I only wish for you the longest ride you can take with the crew who will take the time to experience something deeply and can laugh their way through a multi-way brawl.

What’s on the shelf matters less.

Chaos in the Old World: Household Firsts

• First asymmetrical strategy game
• First multiple win condition game
• First time grasping combat as part of a larger area control scheme
• First game in the Warhammer Fantasy universe

From My New Golden Age of Solo Play: The Thunderbolt Apache Leader Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crate Digging: January 2026

8 of Breakup Gaming Society’s Current Favorite Internet Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My ludic nerve system was inert.

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

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

How do you learn games?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tulsa Okla
10th April, 1934

Dear Sir:

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

Yours truly,
Clyde Champion Barrow

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

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

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

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

Attaboy, get that rulebook out and work this thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned for further reports.

UPDATE: SETI Session Report 1.1

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

They were right. Everything that puzzled me about the game’s pace and action economy stemmed from a bad misreading of Page 7 of the rulebook. I looked up similar questions about turns and rounds on BoardGameGeek, and I still got it wrong. Essentially I didn’t realize that a round of the game will keep having turns as long as players still have something to do. I was giving myself and the bot a single turn each, then closing the round. 

This constricted the action to near-nothingness. The turn baton was supposed to pass back and forth between players until all had taken the Pass action that formally concluded a round. 

My misplay meant that I’d essentially played about 1/3 of a game despite logging five rounds. Not enough stuff happened.

So here are my impressions from what I’m calling SETI First Play 1.1. My job in this heavy Euro space exploration game was to scale the ops of a space agency that is trying to make contact with aliens.

It’s safe to say I failed that job. 

Reminds me of a note I got along with a no-credit grade on a history paper in college from the professor: “The assignment was to write a history paper considering original sources. I cannot give you a grade as you have managed to evade the enterprise entirely.”

So with the catcalls from more experienced players ringing in my ears. I set the game back up on the easiest solo setting and walked it again. Some notes from that experience as follows:

1. I still say this is an excellent rulebook given the range of things to do and profusion of icons. During my first round of taking the correct amount of turns, I’m looking up every little collision with the game’s action. Each time I do this, I’m rewarded with a new leap of insight into the layered system thinking evident in every piece and step. But it’s still chewy enough of a learn to where I’m bouncing back and forth between that, the FAQ, and rules threads on BoardGameGeek. This does not look like an uncommon experience.

2. During this play, the automa and I triggered the appearance of the Oumuamua and the Anomalies, two of the five species you can find during play.

Boy, what a speedbump that is for a player who’s just getting his head around how to properly take moves, mark things and trigger stuff — all while running the automa properly. Again, the rules seem well-built, but my brain mirrors what it must be like in the boardrooms and control rooms of the agency that discovered these traces: pandemonium that maxes out the allostatic load of your already busy staff.

I still run into a couple confusing cul-de-sacs and have to take a break. I already know I’m going to use these exact same species the next time I play, because I don’t want this procedural stretch of washboard road to include yet two more species with their own rules and pieces. It’s just more than I want at this stage of my learning.

I think in SETI I’ve probably found my uppermost tolerance for how much fuss I can tolerate in a game. A couple years ago, I learned to embrace solo play, but looking back, the games I played the most were light ranging up to chewy middleweights. This is a different order of ask, and while I’m enjoying the hard-won forward yardage, fatigue and exasperation are a factor.

Also noted an interesting — and incorrect — assumption I had about contact: The discoveries sit more inside a contemporary scientific world. The traces are real and verified, but that excitement does not, like I assumed, imply that spindly critters are walking down a gangway to give you a pound and start signing energy drink sponsorships. I appreciate the subtlety of the choice.

Pardon me for zooming in on this, but how they portray the discovery of Anomalies is a perfect example. When aliens come out, so do new pieces and cards. One of the cards is an action that — in beautiful thumbnail fashion — tells us how to imagine contact in the world of the game. In the illustration, a child in a sandbox has made three concentric rings of sand and is playing with a small model of one of the anomalies while a frowning mother looks on. I loved this touch.

3. The outcome. Take this number with a grain of salt, but when the dust settles, I have outscored the automa 121 to 107 — owing mostly to a nice bushel of points from the tucked income card set collection gold tile and an all-hands effort to drop a lander on Triton, one of Neptune’s moons.

Keep in mind that for learning purposes, I played this game without the scoring objectives, which put extra pressure on your actions choices and come at five levels of difficulty. But when I’m learning something chunky, I like to take the option of as few elective complications as possible. I think the fact that I won — allowing for lingering areas where I’m still making mistakes — is likely a clear demonstration that I’m ready for the proper solo mode.

NEXT: I finish the match with a handful of lingering edge-case rules questions, a sense of wonder and admiration for this game system, and, most importantly, an immediate desire to try it again. I’m about to tear it down and set it back up under the exact same conditions because there are some procedures I’m still shaky on.

I’m giving myself the license to do this at my own pace. It’s hard not to compare myself to all the tabletop media people out there who seem to inhale and crystallize whole mountains of cardboard every week. That ain’t me. That’s OK.

One of the things I find I like most about being a solo board gamer is the freedom to stare, stumble, and wander through a session without the anxiety of pacing, teaching or generating immediate and decisive rulings for others. Isn’t that the reason we do this, anyway, to build a fort of our time that doesn’t answer to the hellish speed of the world?

Or, sometimes, the hell of other people?

Looking forward, there’s only one Big Question, and that’s the Wingspan Question. I bought that smash hit from Stonemaier a few summers ago to find out What the Kids Were Up To and to challenge my regular biases when I’m shopping for a game.

Of the solo games I’ve learned during this stretch of my solo career, Wingspan has more parallels with SETI than any of my other recent off-menu choices, although it was much easier to learn than this. I played Wingspan solo twice. It was one of the 40-odd games I gave to a neighbor a few months ago.

I liked Wingspan very much. But because I learn slowly and play what I learn obsessively, I knew by last year that there was no way Wingspan was going to contend with Pavlov’s House, Thunderbolt Apache Leader, Vijayanagara or Final Girl for table time. I’m wondering how SETI challenges this middleweight lineup. The fact that I’m excited to try it again is promising, and the challenge of slowing down to learn it has been an odd confidence booster. Look for more reports, maybe even a proper review, in later episodes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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