Just over 5 years ago, I reached out to a few local gamers on BGG and some of the regulars already hanging out at my FLGS to start a weekly boardgame group. On January 16, 2007, we met that first time to play Settlers of Catan and begin our exploration of what has now amounted to over 483 different games...<< MORE >>

December is a pretty big month for me to get games. Between my wedding anniversary (on December 16) and Christmas (including the BGG Secret Santa program), I have a lot of opportunity to pick up games from my wishlist. And between having a couple of family gatherings bleed over into January and then having to exchange a couple of duplicate games in for others, I've only recently completed my game-getting for the holidays. And in all, it's a pretty great haul...<< MORE >>

At midnight, the VivaJava Kickstarter campaign was launched!<< MORE >>

I wasn't terribly happy with my photos from last week, but of all of them, I think that this image from Belfort was my favorite...<< MORE >>

This was a week of returning for the Hypermind Boardgamers. In addition to our sick folks getting all well and coming back, David and Michelle were able to rejoin us due to a new school schedule for this semester. As far as my actual gaming went for the night, it was very similar to 2 weeks ago, but still a heck of a lot of fun. It all started, once again, with a playtest of...<< MORE >>

Okay, it's catch-up time. I've got 2 weeks of game night reporting to do and another game night looming this evening! Let me do what I can to remember what's happened and give a few thoughts...<< MORE >>

I had a really bad picture-taking night at game night last week. Thankfully, I took some pictures of a game that Samantha got for Christmas on another night, and they turned out pretty well...<< MORE >>

Over at BoardGameGeek, I recently stumbled upon an upcoming game that I'm pretty excited about. It's a relatively light space combat game called Gunship: First Strike by Steve A. Wood and his fledgling company, Escape Pod Games...<< MORE >>

Kingdom of Solomon is mish-mash of euro mechanics that might be easily ignored by a lot of boardgamers. If you look superficially at its component parts, it'd be very simple to write it off as derivitave, uninspired, and nothing special.

But if you look a little deeper, you might just be surprised at what you find. From its theme to the tweaks it takes on familiar mechanics to the way that everything fits together to make something greater than the sum of its parts, Kingdom of Solomon really does stand out in a number of ways...<< MORE >>

Big Problems - So, what was wrong with it? Most importatly to me, it was that the "best" way to play the game was to totally ignore your patients, or, even worse, to actively seek to make them worse so you could send them to Critical Care and have more time to spend doing "quality improvement". I had some pretty clear design goals for this game, and this really slapped every freaking one of them in the face...<< MORE >>