LCG Showdown: Netrunner, Star Wars

LCGs, or Living Card Games, despite what the term might bring to mind, are not from the imaginations of Sid and Marty Krofft.

Mage Knight Board Game: One Year Later

I got together with Jeff the other night to play Mage Knight. This is a game that many heralded as a masterpiece upon its release last December, myself included, but you're always going to get those people who want to be a skeptic.  Pfft.

Guess what? One year later, I'm sticking to my guns.

The New Science: The New Game I Don't Want To Play

Not a whole lot of gaming this week. What I did play was The New Science and the new Core Worlds expansion (more on that at a later date). I also played a ton of crokinole with my brother, an event that will go down as Crokegeddon 2013. Hoo boy. That was a time.

So yeah, The New Science.  Let's get on with this.

2012: The Year Gaming Spun Its Wheels In Place

I used to prescribe to the big "best of" hoopla that comes around at the end of every year. I lost a whole lot of interest in it last year, scrambling to fit in as many hot games as I could just so that I could report in on them on my podcast. It sort if made playing games feel like work, and made doing the podcast feel even more so. For a time I was dead set on having that "year in review" episode being my last since it really spoiled two things I enjoyed doing. Plus, I initially named Eclipse to be my Game of the Year and not Mage Knight, so there was that little bit of embarassment.  Now those "best of" lists are making their way out again, but it's not so much that I don't have a podcast looming over my head that has me not caring about them. It's the fact that so few new games really clicked with me in 2012.

The Christmas Spoils, part 3: Descent Second Edition

So here's a surprise.

I sat down. I played Descent. I had a good time.

The Christmas Spoils, part 2: Android: Netrunner

When your employer rezes their Pink Slip agenda, leaving your ass canned, you've got to hack their shit, leave them with nothing!

...or just get Netrunner on the table.

The Christmas Spoils, part 1: Article 27

It seems it's the best of times and the worst of times...but they probably aren't all that bad.

Christmas has come and gone, and with it came an armload of cool new games.  However, my good friend Matt has just unexpectedly lost his job.  I've been there myself, and I remember that on the day it happened, getting a friend over and playing Last Night on Earth really helped me take my mind off things.  So it seems appropriate that I got to pay that forward this week, getting in a two day stint of gaming with Matt and bringing some of those new games to the table.  The first game of the Christmas run was Matt's copy of Article 27.

Welcome to The Infinite-Sided Die

Opinions are not time stamped, set-in-stone ideas.  They're constantly changing as we're exposed to new concepts, or overexposed to what we already know.  In the case of gaming, the medium changes as well, mechanics that one game introduced are re-developed and are refined in another.  You might find that a game you really enjoyed the first time you played it doesn't hold up over repeat plays.  Sometimes you might revisit a game you thought you didn't care for at first and find that you actually really enjoy it.  All sorts of things are responsible for changes in opinion, and there really isn't anything in reviews that reflects that, regardless of subject.  By and large, a review is written, the author submits it as their final opinion, and that opinion is all that stands as people read it over time.

The Infinite-Sided Die is about reviewing games a bit differently.  It's not about in depth rules explanations followed by a nice, neat summary of how I feel.  It's about chronicling how a game holds up long term, the ups and downs over time.  I'm writing reviews, but every entry on a game is never meant to be my final opinion.  It's also about the people I play games with.  I love games, make no mistake about it, but they'd be nothing without great people to play them with.