Troy Press

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!

Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, became the first interactive fiction to ever win a Hugo Award!

While typically I run year-long TTRPG campaigns, I had an opportunity to run a summer-long campaign. Sometimes less is more, and this was a wonderful experience.

Here are some ideas for when you need a dungeon for your players to explore: Dyson’s Dodecahedron maps, Roleplaying Tips’ five-room dungeons, the One-Page Dungeon Contest, Perilous Wilds, Improv Almanac, and Hex Describe.

Here are the top-rated Hugo winners of the past 10+ years, according to GoodReads.com: #1 Network Effect, #2 The Stone Sky, #3 A Desolation Called Peace.

Unlike the TMS1000, which had 32 bytes (bytes, not kilobytes!) of RAM, the unit in Dark Tower, the TMS1400, had twice that: 64 bytes of RAM. As perspective, this single sentence using ASCII takes 64 bytes! Bytes weren’t the basic unit: nybbles were (half-bytes, consisting of 4 bits). So, in Dark Tower, the amount of gold, food and warriors a player has are stored as two-nybble BCD representations rather than as traditional binary numbers.

Nothing breaks my immersion in a story so much as a coincidence. No spoilers, but two points in season 2 of The Last of Us with coincidences so angered me that I turned off the TV. And rewatching Strange New Worlds, in preparation for the new season, the one person who survives an attack that kills 200 is by coincidence the only regular cast member aboard that ship.