Troy Press

Dark Tower was one of my favorite boardgames as a kid. It was an “electronic boardgame,” a category that came to life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dark Tower really was a boardgame, complete with a board and player pawns (nicely sculpted plastic warriors, as well as a dragon miniature) with a rotating computer assistant shaped like a black tower.

You can play Solitaire Square online on Itch.io: fill a 6×6 grid with cards numbered from 1 (red) to 80 (violet) in ascending order. Playing a card immediately next to another card costs you the difference in discards (e.g., playing 53 next to 50 costs you three discards). 

I really enjoy the premise of Enterprise: the first human deep space explorers using the first warp-five starship. It’s a fun era of Star Trek, and they handle many aspects of being a prequel right, even if they went against fan expectations. I get why people think it is one of the worst Treks and don’t want to watch all of it, but I wanted to curate the best episodes.

Over on the PbtA Discord, someone shared a meme about The Iliad, which prompted me to wax poetical. No surprise given the name of this website.

Most roleplaying games take place linearly, but some embrace the tropes of fiction and lean into narrative tricks like flashbacks. For instance, in a movie, one of the main characters will say to the others that they have a plan, and then the next scene will flash forward. You won’t learn what that plan is until later, as you see it unfold or as you see a flashback. If that fits your style of play, here’s a move you can add to your game.

⭐⭐⭐⭐, 4 of 5 stars, a fun mobile boardgame if not quite as thematic or challenging as I’d like. I wanted something heavier to play on my phone while I travelled, so I picked up Steam: Rails to Riches by Martin Wallace (available, no surprise, on Steam as well as for the iPhone and Android). The game is a redesign of Age of Steam, which I’ve played a bit and always found to be a taut experience.

Planet of the Week is my PbtA homage to shows like Star Trek, Firefly, and Stargate: Atlantis. You’re the away team of the research vessel Endeavor Maru. You’re the first group to land on each new planet, making first contact with aliens, investigating strange phenomena, and giving whatever assistance is needed. Can you stay true to your values as you explore?

Sturgeon’s Law says that “ninety percent of everything is crap.” With 940 episodes of Star Trek so far, assuming 90% are crap, the top 10% would be 94 episodes—but let’s round that up to an even 100. Here are the top 100 highest rated episodes from IMDB, from the nearly one thousand episodes across 49 series of television and the 14 movies (though none of the movies made the list).

I conceived of my artlang Muna Lingi as the language of the pulotu, groups of singers who traveled between the Polynesian islands, sharing songs, stories, and news from other islands. These singers were themselves drawn from many islands, and Muna Lingi was initially their lingua franca when at sea. Over time it became a language in its own right, and the source of songs, tales, and news for isolated islanders.

We started a campaign using the second edition of Apocalypse World. At the end of July 2024, Vincent Baker announced a beta of AW: Burned Over 2024 for his Patreon subscribers. We began using the reworded basic moves where we could. It took quite a few months before I managed to get three of my players to convert their playbooks.

Filk music (the folk music of science-fiction and fantasy fandom) is much less mainstream than rock songs with science-fiction themes (sometimes called found filk). Unlike my Top 15 Filk & Geek Rock Songs, which is based on listening stats from streaming services, for this “best of” list I asked U.S. adults in an omnibus survey to name one to three songs.

Most GMs like to prepare those specific aspects of NPCs that are important to them: names, drives/instincts, loyalty, connections, attitude, voice, media models, appearance, faces, actions / GM moves, and system-specific detail.

Reflections on PbtA Design is a collection of my past blog posts that discuss different facets of PbtA games—from their core principles to specific implementations across various genres and settings. It also includes plenty of new material. Whether you want to design your own PbtA game, get a broad view of how different PbtA games handle things, or read reviews about other games, this is the ebook for you. Bonus: All the sections I wrote are now licensed under the Creative Commons.