The Crowded Table: Autumn 2011 Edition

The boardgaming world is a lot like Hollywood, sometimes: months can go by with nothing in the theaters but subtitled snorefests or the latest McConaughey/Hudson romantic comedy, and then, suddenly, we get The Avengers vs. JLA, Son of Jaws, and Massive End of the World Movie, Part 3 all in the same weekend. Autumn has been a bit like that for boardgames, with ships heading into port loaded with cardboard goodies on what has seemed like a daily basis. Monkey238 and I have been playing as much and as quickly as possible, but in times like these it’s great to break out this handy standard feature with brief impressions on a notable few, many of... Read More

MACE 2011 Convention Wrap-up

Greetings, dear readers, ’tis the season for gaming! No, not because of the impending holidays (although that’s wonderful, as well), but because it’s the time of the year when we can load up the party wagon and head west – an hour west to our local con, MACE, in High Point. Last year, only three of us made the trek. This year, however, we had a veritable gang of geeky gamers – seven of us in total. The resulting maelstrom of gaming and imbibing manly liquids left me with some fuzzy accounts, but I shall endeavor to do my best to summarize all the geeky goodness. And although there was no bear rape nor freezer incidents... Read More

A Sweet Science: An Interview with JAB Designer Gavan Brown

For generations, “the sweet science” has always referred to the manly art of fisticuffs; you know, boxing. When I was but a wee lad, I heard the term and immediately imagined a man in a big, white lab coat mixing up ice cream flavors in the lab – such are the machinations of the five-year-old mind. Regardless, for many years of my youth, whenever I would draw I would draw ice cream. Lots and lots of ice cream. Looking back now on all those drawings of ice cream cones, I guess I truly associated art with my personal “sweet science.” All of this is to say that I now have the perfect storm of interpersonal connections*... Read More