I have a terrible addiction to chess variants. My favorite variants add new and bizarre angles to the traditional game. Uncertainty, asymmetry, obstacles, new goals, or a new spacial dimension. But Sovereign Chess re-engineers the traditional game into a completely new beast.

Oil Companies are existential threats to humanity — “Buying this book is not a contribution to the environmentalist cause. But it is a means to inspire action. The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” — Ecopunk: 2044 Just after this year’s Earth Day, Vice published a…

A Fantasy Role-Playing Game About Hacking — “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” — Edward Snowden Cryptomancer is basically Lord of the Rings meets Mr. Robot with a side of…

‘Spectaculars’ and ‘Risus: The Anything RPG’ do Marvel better than Marvel — Marvel Multiverse is the ‘Morbius’ of tabletop roleplaying games. It didn’t need to be made, and it was made by someone that doesn’t get Marvel. That last bit is particularly confusing because the head designer had written Marvel tie-ins before. Marvel Multiverse has a few things going for it, but…

Highlights and Low Points — The Quarter-Finals Riptide vs SawBlaze Right off the bat, SawBlaze managed to pop Riptide into the air with just its forks. Riptide got its licks in, but SawBlaze bullied Riptide all over the box, smashing it into the walls. SawBlaze only let that hammer-saw fly once it had control. Ultimately, SawBlaze tipped the rookie…

How to roleplay in Invincible’s bloody sandbox. — Invincible is not like other comic book universes. Except for the superpowers and demons and stuff, it’s more, for lack of a better word, “realistic”. It’s bloody. Property damage is massive. People die all the time. HEROES die, and it’s really hard to bring them back from the dead. Few…

Was Whiplash Robbed??? — Uppercut vs. Riptide The number 21 seed ROOKIE decimated Uppercut after scoring the first big hit and not letting up. Riptide was all over Uppercut, and at some point sliced a wheel open and sent foam all over the Battlebox. Riptide KO’d Uppercut without breaking a sweat. Rotator vs. Tantrum A spark-fest. This fight…

BattleBots 2022 Championship Recap: Week 2 — Hydra vs Defender The carnage started off with a Play-in match. The winner would be officially seeded into the championship. Hydra is the most feared flipper-bot in the world, but it did not live up to that reputation in the regular season. It did not send bots flying. It often had the…