Death Checkmates Fischer

One of the greatest and most troubled minds in gaming history has lost his battle with Death herself. Bobby Fischer is dead. Known equally for his erratic behavior and brilliant mind, Fischer was an icon of the Cold War, when the 64 squares of the chessboard proxied for the world as the battleground of the [...]

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How many did you say?

Game night had been passed over a lot over the past weeks, due to myriad holiday and work commitments among the group, but also due to several illnesses that took all of us down at one point or another. While playing on the Frog’s Wii was fun, there’s still nothing like an organic tabletop game [...]

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Wow, we played boardgames (Part III: Reiner Knizia’s Blue Moon City)

Reiner’s attempt to water down Magic: the Gathering into a game playable by the general gaming crowd was less than impressive. (Read: Blue Moon is underwhelming.) This attempt at franchise-building a-la Catan isn’t unusual, but the product has to measure up. On the heels of a Deutsch novel to further support the world-building of the [...]

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Wow, we played boardgames (Part I: Reiner Knizia’s Taj Mahal)

Due to the influx of holidays and the D&D campaign, boardgaming time has been hard to come by. One of our team was stricken by illness this past weekend, causing the cancellation of murderous mayhem and allowing us time to relax and play nonviolent German games again. It was just myself, Nix and The Frog [...]

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Reiner Knizia’s Samurai according to gaijin

I recently played several games of Samurai with Mary and Gerald over at MabiWeb. Going we, we all claimed to be piss-poor Samurai players. Hyperbole aside, I really struggle with this game. I think it’s due to the funky, opportunistic timing of the play and the stutter-step narrative. I equate this cadence to one other [...]

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That’s Balderdash

So last time we got a boardgame to the table, we were looking for something heavy. The suggestions went: Die Macher, Java, Taj Mahal, Medina, La Citta, The Princes of Florence or Goa. I had all of those games in my bag or in the car. Oh foolish me. Due to time spent on simply [...]

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Board Game Internet Awards 2006

The good folks over at the Gone Gaming group weblog have just completed the nomination period for the 2006 edition of the Board Game Internet Awards. My old boardgame-centric weblog was nominated last year. This year has a lot of great nominees. I don’t get a vote, but if I did, these would be my [...]

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A Quiet Night with the Doctor

Most of the folks in our regular boardgaming crowd are engaged in a high-level D&D game, so that means most weekends there’s no boardgaming. Last Saturday, three of us not participating in the game were visitors at the Lily Pad. That presented an opportunity to get a couple of games to the table. None of [...]

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Memoirs of a Gamer, Part II

This is the second part of a my so-called gaming memoirs. The first part is here. II. Outside of Home, Early Childhood At school, the board games of home gave way to card games and dexterity games. The standard physical play of jumprope, hide-and-seek, tag, dueling yo-yos and street games (patintero, tumbang preso and siato [...]

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Memoirs of a Gamer, Part I

I turn 35 today. For most of those years, my recreation choices have shown a heavy bias towards games. Since I’ve been awat from the journal a while, I decided to do a sort of “memory dump” of the role of gaming in my life. For those of you who read this space for other [...]

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