AUGUST 19, 2026
★★★★★
George Orwell's totalitarian nightmare, which I made the mistake of rereading at my desk between meetings, and which still works exactly as well as it did the first time.
Read more »AUGUST 18, 2026
★★★★☆
Peter Watts sends a crew of psychologically damaged deep sea workers to man a geothermal rift station, and the resulting book is bleak enough that my own commute started looking pretty good by comparison.
Read more »AUGUST 17, 2026
★★★★★
Frank Herbert's desert planet epic, which I bounced off twice before it finally clicked on attempt three, and which I now understand why people reread ten times.
Read more »JULY 22, 2026
A no talking co-op game turns out to be a terrible first game to teach a twelve year old who very much wants to talk.
Read more »JULY 18, 2026
★★★★★
A two player, no talking dice placement game where you and your co-pilot silently land a plane together, which is a lot more tense than that sentence makes it sound.
Read more »JUNE 26, 2026
★★★★☆
C.J. Cherryh's first contact slow burn, which spends more time on internal monologue than plot and mostly earns it once the political weight of that monologue lands.
Read more »JUNE 13, 2026
A two mile paved loop around a lake in Des Moines, and the one part of my week that has nothing to do with games, books, or the phone in my pocket.
Read more »JUNE 8, 2026
★★★★★
A campaign card game that blurs into a full RPG, and which one reviewer clocked at thirteen hours in one weekend plus eight more the next day, a pace I understand completely.
Read more »MAY 30, 2026
A running, unglamorous log of every game I've played and every book I've finished, kept for no reason other than I got tired of forgetting.
Read more »MAY 25, 2026
A piano, a third floor walkup, and a crew that called me from the stairwell to ask if I was serious.
Read more »MAY 6, 2026
★★★★★
N.K. Jemisin's earthquake-planet fantasy, told partly in second person, which should not have worked on me and worked on me completely.
Read more »MAY 2, 2026
★★★★☆
A Lord of the Rings reskin of 7 Wonders Duel that earns its own identity instead of coasting on the theme, three win conditions running at once in a thirty minute box.
Read more »APRIL 20, 2026
A rating I gave without thinking hard enough about why, and what it took a second read to actually notice.
Read more »APRIL 8, 2026
★★★★☆
Peter F. Hamilton's 1200 page space opera opener, which spends its first quarter reading like a physics lecture and then quietly turns into a horror novel about the dead coming back through a hole in reality.
Read more »APRIL 6, 2026
A mild, deliberately unfashionable opinion about why an empty chair across the table matters more to me than any solo mode ever will.
Read more »APRIL 3, 2026
★★★☆☆
Ernest Cline's virtual reality treasure hunt, which is a blast for the first half and then starts showing its seams once you notice the plot is basically an infodump delivery system.
Read more »MARCH 26, 2026
Money isn't really the reason anymore. A used copy just tells you something a shrink wrapped one never will.
Read more »MARCH 19, 2026
★★★★★
A deckbuilder and worker placement hybrid set in Herbert's universe, which clicked so much harder once I actually knew who the Bene Gesserit were.
Read more »MARCH 16, 2026
The lunch break that turned into a hobby, and the guy at the office who's still the reason my shelf looks the way it does.
Read more »MARCH 7, 2026
★★★★★
A cooperative living card game where you actually play as the hero, and once I started logging my plays by character I realized how much of my winter it had quietly eaten.
Read more »MARCH 3, 2026
★★★★☆
Umberto Eco's monastery murder mystery, which asks a lot of patience for its medieval theology detours and pays it back completely once the actual mystery takes over.
Read more »FEBRUARY 28, 2026
★★★★☆
A tiny two player deckbuilder that lives in my bag for whenever I end up somewhere with fifteen spare minutes and another willing person.
Read more »FEBRUARY 23, 2026
★★★★☆
An Egyptian mythology area control game that rewards aggression from turn one, and punishes anyone who tries to sit back and tech up quietly.
Read more »FEBRUARY 22, 2026
A small, specific rule I've kept for years, and the one night I broke it that proved why it exists.
Read more »JANUARY 29, 2026
★★★★☆
Nick Bostrom's dense case for AI as existential risk, which took me the better part of a month to get through and which I disagreed with in places the whole way and still couldn't put down.
Read more »JANUARY 12, 2026
★★★★★
The roguelike deckbuilder I already had forty hours in on PC, translated to cardboard, which should have felt redundant and instead became the version I actually want to play now.
Read more »DECEMBER 27, 2025
★★★★★
The smaller, friendlier entry point into Gloomhaven's tactical dungeon crawling, which did exactly what it's supposed to do and talked me into buying the much bigger box after.
Read more »DECEMBER 19, 2025
★★★★☆
A superhero card game with more bookkeeping than any card game has a right to demand, that somehow still earns the theme every single time it clicks.
Read more »DECEMBER 11, 2025
★★★☆☆
Thaler and Sunstein's case for choice architecture, which is genuinely useful in the first half and gets shakier the further it wanders from cafeteria trays and retirement plans.
Read more »DECEMBER 4, 2025
A dispatch estimate that fell apart by lunchtime, and why I still can't stop applying the same math to a board game box.
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