Troy Press

Lexember is a social-media challenge to add at least one word to your constructed language (conlang) each day of December. This year I’ve created three sets of prompts, depending on how ambitious you are.

Voyage of the Marigold, by Andrew Stephens, is an interesting twist on classic Trek games. Like the first Trek, in Voyage of the Marigold you’re exploring a grid, but—in contrast—you’re encountering strange new worlds and anomalies as you explore, and you responding to choice prompts rather than using a command menu.

Near the end of my watch-through of the top 100 episodes of Star Trek, I got to the Star Trek: Prodigy series. I decided to expand from the eight episodes that made the top 100 and watch the top 10ish Prodigy episodes.

Prepping a planet for a session requires embracing some tropes and being generous with your hooks. I grew up on location-based prep. “Here’s a dungeon or a hexmap. It tells you where and what everything is.” In contrast, you can’t prep a planet at that level of detail, unless maybe it’s one of the planetoids visited by The Little Prince! Fortunately, the tropes common to space opera simplify what players expect.

In my study of Tiny BASICs, one I overlooked reviewing was Sinclair 4K BASIC, which stands out for its unique keyboard, its approach to graphics, and its memory usage.

While most fantasy TTRPGs embrace pantheons of gods, few include demigods, the offspring of the union of a god and human. Yet demigods present the opportunity to bring the life of the gods down to earth and to connect PCs with the gods in a unique way.

If your Powered by the Apocalypse game has stats, you want the basic moves to make a balanced use of those stats. That’s not always as simple as having five basic moves for your five basic stats, for instance, because moves may get used in play at different frequencies. 

The most played board games are old; some are even ancient (#2 most played, Checkers; #3 Chess; #13 most played, Backgammon). The only game to make the list from this century—and just making the list, at #22—is Ticket to Ride. 

To my surprise, Oðblgshezi has taken a life of its own. My absolute favorite is that Goodfire Brewing not only named a Kölsch after it, they put a calculator on the can!

While the Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest epic poem known, and one of the oldest works of literature, it was lost to history until the 1870s. Since then, different versions have been painstakingly reconstructed from broken cuneiform tablets scattered all over the world. Checking Amazon and Goodreads, here’s how different translations and adaptations are rated.

I had a chance to interview Jon Simantov, designer of Liberation and Vamp on the Batwalk, among other card games.

The majority of those Americans who have provided ratings have logged 1-25 ratings (58%), yet these ratings comprise only 1% of all the ratings that one sees. Nearly half (47%) the published ratings are from the 2% of reviewers who have rated more than 500 items.

The premise is simple—and absurd. Nuclear waste explodes and propels the moon out of our solar system at FTL speeds. While the 300 people living on Moonbase Alpha have no control over the moon’s trajectory, fortunately it encounters a new planet or alien every week!