Why Risa Puno's Games Ask You to Be Vulnerable in Public
Artist Risa Puno transforms familiar games into intimate spaces for emotional processing, stripping away fantasy to confront feelings directly.
tabletop games
Making Magic: The Malaysian Artists Decolonizing Fantasy Gaming
Malaysian creative duo Mun Kao and Zedeck Siew blend Southeast Asian folklore with tabletop gaming through their illustrated zine series A Thousand Thousand Islands, reimagining fantasy beyond Anglo-European traditions.
Gayatri Kodikal: Excavating the ruins of history, time, and play
Artist Gayatri Kodikal transforms an archaeological mystery of a severed hand into an immersive game installation that challenges Western notions of time and history while weaving together colonial narratives, resistance stories, and South Asian perspectives.
Fall of Magic turns everyone into a gifted author
Fall of Magic is the kind of free form storytelling you could do with your friends on the floor just about anywhere. Play some Howard Shore soundtracks in the background, light a few candles, and unroll the scroll. As an engine for creating stories it’s deceptively slight. From the rulebook: “Someon
The Dismal Western Front of The Grizzled
The First World War is often referred to as The Great War, due to its immense scope, as it incited all the world’s national powers and resulted in a devastating death toll. Set within this war is the tabletop game The Grizzled, which makes no attempt to capture such scale, and instead hones in on a
A new tabletop game challenges you to maximize ratings as a TV executive
Operating a television network is not a game. Hold your laughter and that thought. We’ll return to it momentarily. The Networks is a tabletop game that challenges players to perform the duties of TV executives who seek to maximize viewership and, consequently, profit. You bid for shows and talent an
Cards Against Urbanity lets you study and mock urban planning at the same time
The difference between Cards Against Humanity and the sort of flashcards used for revision is, I suppose, that the latter can come in a greater range of colours. Sure, “a cat video so cute your eyes roll back and your spine slides out your anus” is not the typical exam prompt, but the mechanics are
Forget Donald. The Contender stages your own, better presidential debate
The Contender is a tabletop game that combines the rhetoric of political campaigns and the mechanics of Cards Against Humanity, all of which raises a thorny interpretive question: Would tonight’s second Republican presidential debate be improved if it were replaced by a televised game of The Contend
Scale is exposing the challenges of scaling videogames
Scale is a puzzle game with a straightforward elevator pitch: “You wield a device that can make any item any size.” This is a popular pitch. It earned the game $108,020 in funding from over 5,000 backers during its Kickstarter campaign. Steve Swink, Scale’s creator, subsequently created an alpha ver
Why are tabletop games killing it on Kickstarter?
We are in the midst of a board game boom, and FiveThirtyEight has figured out why: Kickstarter. You should read the whole story, but here’s the crux of Oliver Roeder’s analysis: “Since [2009], pledges to board and card game projects on the site have totaled $196 million, according to the company. Ni
Playing with yourself in Guild of Dungeoneering
Guild of Dungeoneering cutely recreates tabletop roleplaying.
Splendor exhibits all the challenges of going from tabletop to tablet
Does a great boardgame make a great videogame? Not necessarily.
In its ongoing attempt to recreate the entire world, Netrunner heads to India
Hacker culture meets Hinduism.
Vin Diesel is the nicest Dungeon Master ever
We talk to the game’s creator about how it’s not a joke.
An experiment in composing a soundtrack for a tabletop game as it’s being played
When you think of tabletop gaming what do you hear? It’s probably stone-cold silence as players shoot glances at each other, peering between decks and figurines, trying to weigh up one another. Or a monotone voice reciting the rules for the 34th time in order to explain why you can’t make that move
How to make a boardgame, from one of the best designers in the world
French designer Antoine Bauza has helped the European boardgame industry thrive.
What videogame RPGs could learn from Community
Remember the beginning of Skyrim? Yeah, neither do we.
Learn to laugh at terrible stereotypes with this upcoming card game
We might all be terrible, but at least we can laugh about it with a card game.
Red Flags is a card game of perfect partners and terrible dates
You meet the person of your dreams. They have everything you want in a partner: a love for dogs, the ability to write poetry that is not in any way embarrassing, unrivalled loyalty, and a yacht. There’s just one catch. This potential match calls you by their ex’s name. And this isn’t an isolated inc
Brewin’ USA: A tabletop game that fits right in at the bar
Drinks are on you!
Playing The Quiet Year, a tabletop game about building communities
Where contempt is a mechanic.
Monikers wants its box to be as much fun as the game inside
It’s an ode to gif culture, on cardboard.
I fell in love with a sex ninja at the end of the world
How Apocalypse World sets players free by taking away control.
Boardgames are a pain. This app may help
Boardgames are great, but they are an enormous pain in the ass. This is both part of the appeal and the reason more people don’t get into them. They’re heavy, generally expensive, they require hours to set up and take apart, as well as gobs of free time penciled into a handful of people’s schedules.
Here Be Monsters
How Dungeons and Dragons lets you map the fantastic places in the corners of your mind.