Dan Hinkin

At the 2023 Origins Game Fair, I was able to meet a friendly board game creator named Rusty Lumpkin, owner of Three Nail Games. A teacher and a family man, Rusty wanted to create engaging gateway games that could be used in classrooms and played with his children. One of the games that caught my eye was Sea of Plunder, a pirate adventure game where players try to outmaneuver unsavory sailors, the worst, sometimes being the other players.

The thought of being a game master for a roleplaying group scares me a bit. While I have no problem teaching a board game or acting out the role of a dwarven monk or a space ranger, being in charge of a group and creating a world for them to explore gives me the willies. On numerous occasions, I've read about and through new game systems surrounding familiar properties, thinking to myself, I know this world well enough to create a game, but I've never been able to pull the trigger. With the Pathfinder 2E Remaster: GM Core and its partner Player Core, I think I may have found the system I could lead players through.

When my late friend, Brian Fitzpatrick – self-proclaimed nerd and all around great guy – invited me to play a role-playing game set in a system that

Tabletop gaming has blown up in recent years, and thanks to organizations like Games & Gaming Roundtable (GameRT) and Tabletop Alliance bringing games and game awareness into libraries and schools, that awareness is growing! We chat with George Bergstrom of GameRT and Josh Isringhauser of Tablet

We saw a lot of great games at GAMA Expo last month, and we’ve got a few quick looks at some of them on today’s podcast! In addition to several new games that we saw for the first time, we got a few updates on some that we’ve been tracking since last year’s Expo! Some updates on games we’ve covered

As you run out of the room with the giant blood monster swiping at your heels, you see the creature that belongs to the squishing sound you heard earlier has appeared from down the hall. The creature has a sickly mixture of yellow, gray, and black hues throughout its jelly-like substance of a body. As a member of your party trips and crashes into the wall, the jelly moves toward the sound. A throw of a dart towards the creature connects, but an acidic smoke and the smell of burning accompanies the strike. No matter what you do, the creature keeps oozing forward. I wonder what the creature would do if it met the unstoppable monster from the previous room…Creatures in a role-playing game can come in many different shapes, sizes, iterations, and are only limited by someone's imagination. However, sometimes you don't have the time to create or need a good starting place. Enter the Pathfinder Second Edition: Monster Core.

Many games in the tabletop space have solo modes. Oftentimes they adapt the rules to add in a dummy player, have players play in an alternate way, sometimes players are trying to beat a top score, and sometimes they are given a list of challenges. Usually these modes are added as an afterthought and are not always fleshed out compared to their multiplayer companions. Then there are the games that are created specifically for one player. These games are even less common, but offer players an opportunity to go on an adventure designed specifically for them. With Black Sonata, players are treated with an adventure through an Elizabethan era Shakespeare adventure.

Normally we don't publish full reviews of Kickstarters, but this expansion was provided to the team in its completed form before launch.

Mike finally recounts his magical trip to Lake Geneva, WI, where he attended Gary Con XVI, kicking off the fiftieth year of Dungeons & Dragons with current and past designers, artists, and luminaries of the game. Luke Gygax explains how Gary Con came to be, and Mike (sloppily) recounts a histori

Game durations on the side of the box- who comes up with those? Why do they always seem wildly inaccurate? What is the point? We talk with five luminary game designers and ask them those questions and more on this week's episode. There are definitely some spicy takes out there, but we get into the nitty gritty of what goes into coming up that number and why, as well as what it doesn't measure and why it is actually pretty important! Ammon Anderson (Gnome Hollow, Twinkle, Twinkle), Jason Matthews (Twilight Struggle, Fort Circle Games), Kevin Wilson (Kinfire Chronicles, Arkham Horror), and brothers Cole and Drew Werhle (John Company, Pax Pamir) share their perspectives on this divisive metric.