The Adventurers Guild is one of those books where I’d expected one thing–not so much a judging a book by its cover, per se, but more like judging it by the genre (young reader’s fantasy… roger that)–but it turned out to be way more than I’d thought it would be. The story itself is solid.Everyone…
I’ve written previously about the importance of finishing projects you start. It’s something I finally got around to committing to way too late in life, which led to decades of untold numbers of just-started or half-finished stories and scripts in my wake. But the flipside to that is the importance of knowing when a project…
Ticket To Ride-First Journey is the junior variation of the popular Ticket To Ride game. As in the original, players must make various lengths of train route connections between cities across the U.S. and Canada in order to complete secretly drawn route goals. Coloured cards are collected from a communal draw pile, and when players…
Based on the (excellent) Wild Kratts television show, Race Around The World pits players as some of the show’s characters racing each other through four types of environment. The show is based on real life animal enthusiast brothers Chris and Martin Kratt, and it spins from them somewhere around the world into a related but…
I’ve done a number of contests through the NYC Midnight organization, including short stories and short scripts. Just over an hour ago (midnight NYC time, not coincidentally) we received the assignments for their latest contest: 100-word microfiction stories that are to be completed in twenty-four hours. What the NYC crew does is randomly places the…
A murder was committed in a local manor and a group of psychics has opted to visit the residence on Halloween to make contact with the restless spirit of the deceased in order to divine who killed him where and with what weapon.Let the seance begin… So goes the (here less eloquent) setting opener for…
In Spy Alley, everyone is a randomly determined spy working for one of six countries. Each player knows who they are and what country they work for, but it’s a secret from others. As you roll the die to move your character around the board, you’re trying to buy/collect your own password, disguise, code book…
My daughter came up with a board game today. I can’t say how well thought-out it was before she drew it onto a large art book-sized page–she’s hacked around with “a start-to-finish path with spaces that have effects”-style board games in the past that were clearly thought up and filled in on the fly–but this…
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seems to be pretty divisive. Either you like it or you don’t. After making a solid go of it and getting pretty deep into the book, I ended up being in the latter category, just from Larsson’s style, which didn’t jibe with me enough that it finally bumped me…
In Labyrinth, each player is a wizard seeking secret treasures in a maze where the hallways and walls are always shifting. The game board is designed with square maze pieces that are adhered to create an open grid pattern where loose modular maze tiles are randomly placed. Some of those tiles (both adhered and loose)…