Crate Digging: January 2026

8 of Breakup Gaming Society’s Current Favorite Internet Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My ludic nerve system was inert.

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

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

How do you learn games?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tulsa Okla
10th April, 1934

Dear Sir:

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

Yours truly,
Clyde Champion Barrow

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

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

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

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

Attaboy, get that rulebook out and work this thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Basic story of my first game:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned for further reports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dwelling Solo RPG Session 6: The Triple Dungeon Feature

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

BASEMENT

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

Remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There?”

“No! By that tower…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A text came in from Sig: WHERE DID U GO

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

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

PHONE: ?

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

PHONE: ???

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

PHONE: TEXT ME BACK

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

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

PHONE: were going

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t hear from her for 72 hours.

Next: The Basement Conjuring

Fund the next chapter, I send you swag.

Check the Donate page. It’s fun.

Ryuutama TTRPG: A Song to Chase Away Our December Gloom

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

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

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

Crate Digging: December 2025 (Stocking Stuffer Remix)

4 Small Creator Finds from Folks in My Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weep later. Move it now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crate Digging: December 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congrats to Our Namer of Drinks

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

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

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

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

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

Runners-Up That Made the Decision Tough

The Bruised Husband (Absolute art from Boogie Nights Errant)

Blurry Orchard (Very clever, Dave)

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

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

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Support the show and get a bonus Skrrt_Vonnegut drink recipe.

Support the show and get a bonus Skrrt_Vonnegut drink recipe.

Crate Digging: November 2025

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

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

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

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

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Get the Breakup Gaming Society cocktail booklet.

Get the Breakup Gaming Society cocktail booklet.

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

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

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

Walt’s Criteria, in His Words:

1) It has to be an RPG

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

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

2) It has to be indie

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

3) It probably has a “gimmick”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carolina Death Crawl
Bully Pulpit Games

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

Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel
SandroAD

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

Lichoma
Bogfolk, Strega Wolf van den Berg

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

Ryuutama
Kotodama Heavy Industries, Atsuhiro Okada

Be a bard in the medieval Japanese countryside, get in some rascally misadventures, and undertake an inventive journey in group storytelling. Click here for our interview with Walt, who gives us an introductory tour of the game’s concepts.

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Hear my work with the Dwelling solo journaling RPG.

Hear my work with the Dwelling solo journaling RPG.

Dwelling Solo RPG Session 5: Eyes of a Boring God

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

FOYER & FRONT DOOR

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

Conjure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I finally slept on the ride back to Denver.

Next: The Basement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cave Evil Resurrected: Interview With Co-Designer Nate Hayden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🚨 Some Plot Spoilers🚨

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The win? That’s kind of up to you. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except I kept getting overrun. What the hell happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakup Gaming Society Hits 100: Official Press Release

CONTACT
Nate Warren
chief.rocka@breakupgamingsociety.com

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

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

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

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

Breakup Gaming Society's 100th Episode features:

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

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

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

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

• Several instances of psychological decay framed as insight and transformation

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

About Breakup Gaming Society

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