Category Archives: Reviews

According to many surveys I’ve conducted over the years, Uno is the most popular card game in America. For instance, in our recent Nation of Gamers survey, 23% of U.S. adults who had played a card game said the last card game they had played was Uno, outpacing even games that can be played with a standard deck of cards (e.g., Spades, 12%; Solitaire, 9%). I think one overlooked aspect of Uno’s popularity is that it plays well with larger groups, with the publisher saying that it is good for […]

This afternoon we played Dialect, by Thorny Games, a game about coining words as part of telling the story of a community. The game comes with four types of isolated communities, including a Mars colony, but we picked a 1980s cult, because of course we did. (And there are many third-party frameworks for different types of communities as well.) Unlike role playing games, storytelling games such as Dialect typically involve more player negotiation about directions of the story. This is akin to the collaborative worldbuilding at the start of some […]

Axis & Allies & Zombies is a well-designed crossover game that is just missing some final polish. While it can play up to five, the amount of downtime makes it a poor game for more than two players. The significant randomness makes it the least strategic of the Axis & Allies line, which can be a pro or con, depending on your taste—pro: fun battles between two players of uneven skill; con: bad luck can cost you the game. If you’re interested, buy it now, though, as it is no […]

Atma is a card-based, rules-light, improvisational PbtA game, which is perfect for the first-time Game Master and for new role players. Rather than use maps, locations are represented as cards, and you gloss over how characters move between the locations, as the game is structured around three scenes (three location cards). Rather than character sheets, characters are also represented by cards, which will include a starting move, some random moves (drawn before Scene 1 and Scene 2), and a randomly selected Super Move for Scene 3. Any loot items the […]

My 11-year old niece and nephew were in town (twins) and really wanted to see Rampage. While I have no idea why they made a movie about this classic videogame, ironically, the 1986 flyer promoting the game to arcades literally imagined it as a movie: Joshua Rivera has a great history of the making of the video game: “We had come back from a trade show, and I was like ‘Hey, why can’t I do big stuff?’ Because with my pen-and-ink style, if you’ve seen the Rampage cabinet art, there’s […]