A few years back after discovering Todd Sanders’ latest work (Pulp Invasion), I was looking into this game designer and discovered that he had designed a game around the old Gumshoe genre.

[caption id="attachment_307620" align="aligncenter" width="600"] I need a card in this game that lets me play as Rigby Reardon.[/caption]

I loved it! I searched around and I located the base game for Pulp Detective, all three expansions, the slip-cover to hold all of the boxes together (like a set of books), and the puzzle-piece playing board for the combined experience.

This game (and Pulp Invasion) came about after Mr. Sanders acquired the rights to a whole bunch of pulp magazine covers and interior illustrations. In other words, this is the real deal! These are not modern artists mimicking the pulp era styles, these are authentic pulp era pieces. And they are beautiful!

Just the facts, ma’am!

In Pulp Detective, you are a gritty private eye (or detective, or socialite avenger, etc.) who is hot on the case of some nefarious crime that has been committed. You have a day (or sometimes less!) to find the clues, solve the crime, and confront the culprit what did it!

The game is about playing your odds and hedging your bets. But…

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Starmada is a set of rules that allows you to design starships, then (with some miniatures or chits on a hex grid) send them out to reduce other starships to so much space debris. The idea of the game is to be a quick playing, tactical, and universal set of rules for such things. The system for ship design has basic components and myriad add-ons allowing it to simulate just about anything you can think of in a way that ensures that even if you and your friends are simulating different universes, the relative strengths of the ships can be calculated to ensure a fair fight. Want to put a fleet of Star Wars Super Star Destroyers up against a group of Star Trek Borg Cubes or perhaps a few Babylon 5 Vorlon Planet Killers? This game can do that.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Admiralty—the group of volunteers that Daniel Kast (Majestic XII Games) brought together to take Starmada X rules and use them to create a new edition of Starmada a bit over a decade ago. Daniel and the members of the Admiralty were all people that loved many of the previous editions of the game. We each had our thoughts on where the strongest and weakest areas of…

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Nothing out there explores this theme quite like the worldwide sensation The Walking Dead (TWD). For the most part, the world of TWD follows a single group of Survivors, led by Rick Grimes, as they try to find their way in a world that’s hardly recognizable. And, while it initially seems the thing to fear is the titular walking dead, they soon discover that the real terror is other people.

TWD first arrived on the scene as a comic book in 2003. Written by Robert Kirkman, the series’ themes and rabid fan base eventually attracted the attention of the AMC television network who turned it into one of the most popular shows in the history of television. It ran for a total of eleven seasons over a period of twelve years and has spawned a number of spinoff series. While the core television show, and the comic books, have come to an end, it’s clear that The Walking Dead isn’t going anywhere.

From low effort tie-ins such as TWD Monopoly and TWD Jenga to more nuanced efforts such as TWD: Something to Fear, it…

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[caption id="attachment_301989" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Box Cover[/caption]

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Emperor's New Clothes is an art project that claims to be a game. It is not a game, it is a collection of blank, stark-white game pieces that could be used to create a game, I suppose. But that is not really the point. The point is the joke.

If you do not get the joke, then I highly recommend…

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There is a nugget, buried deep within the concept of Paper App Dungeon, that is quite clever. That nugget is the uniqueness of each copy of the game. My booklet, for example, has on its first page the random seed that was used to generate the other pages contained within. I know that my copy is unique; not another one like it.

Once you get past this, there really is little else to say by way of praise.

Playing  the Game

The game consists of a small notepad with 60 pages, and a pencil. This is a normal pencil, only where another pencil might say it is a #2 or have a brand name, this has the numbers 1 thru 6 on each of the sides, turning it into your pencil-die (called a p6 in the rules).

[caption id="attachment_300826" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A 1-6 randomizer built into the pencil. It's a p6. Get it?[/caption]

The first part of the booklet is a summary of the rules. The full rules, the booklet states,…

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I like the various flavors of “and write” games. I have had a lot of fun with games like Welcome To… (flip and write), and most recently Ganz schön clever (roll and write). Some are theme-less number puzzles (not that there’s anything wrong with that), while others can stretch the limits and do something quite spectacular. I have liked seeking out ancient ruins with Lost Cities Roll and Write, for example.  Although I have had a great deal of fun playing Floorplan, it is the fact that the houses that you design in that game, thanks to the dice-driven choices, are not functional. Most of the time, they are not even close. It has been experiences like that which colored my initial expectations for Fantasy Map Maker, a roll and write from Doopy Games. I was pleasantly surprised.

Back in the day, I played a lot of Traveller. That game had systems for randomly generating just about everything! From characters (with their backgrounds) to sectors of space (including the stars, the planets, and the societies that lived on them). Each of these systems was a mini game—you could spend hours having a blast generating characters or interconnected planetary systems. As I played Fantasy Map Maker, it reminded me of my days of generating those sectors of…

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Exuding a spirit of generosity, the review copy of Vinyl: Jukebox arrived with a bonus gift inside: a copy of Vinyl: Holiday Edition. Because there are enough puns to go around when it comes to the music of the Christmas season, Eric Alvarado and the team at Talon Strikes Studios have put together an entirely new game in the spirit of everything Vinyl that has come before.

The heart of the Vinyl series is record collection. Whether it’s the original Vinyl, the Big Band edition, the Metal or 80s expansions, or the distinct and aforementioned Jukebox, each title abounds with slightly knocked off album covers and an affinity for hunting matching icons. Toss in a few colored lights and ornaments and you’re set for the Holiday Edition. 

There’s no place like home for the holidays?

In Holiday Edition, players are building shared Christmas trees to their left and right using cards that feature playful album covers and wintry icons. Each tree begins with a single card at the top, with rows of two, three, four, and two again below (because you need that trunk or the tree won’t stand upright).

Most often, a player turn involves placing one card into position on one of their shared…

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The ice high atop the mountain is melting, and it’s your job to manage the flow of the water to create safe havens for the animals who live on the mountainside. That’s River Wild from Button Shy Games.

[caption id="attachment_287573" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Button Shy wallet for River Wild[/caption]

Hey, There, Wild River

If you’re familiar with Button Shy Games it will come as no surprise that River Wild is a game that comes in a plastic wallet and is made up of a starting card, a scoring card, and 16 two-sided mountain and river cards, for a total of 18 cards.

To play, find the starting mountain top card with pink water spilling out across the full bottom edge of the card, and place it on the table, about arm’s length away. This is the top of the mountain and all your other mountain/water cards will flow ‘down’ from it along the table towards you.

[caption id="attachment_287572" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The starting mountain and river card, along with the two sides of the scoring card[/caption]

Set the scoring card off to the side. Shuffle the…

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Button Shy games have a certain set of characteristics: they are eminently portable (18 cards in a plastic wallet sized sleeve), they’re easy to teach (the rules live on a piece of paper smaller than a paperback book page), they have a surprising depth of gameplay. Super Slopes, one of the newest games from the micro-game titan certainly fits those criteria: a ski run packed with yetis, energy drinks, forest hazards, and as many points as you can grab on the way down the mountain. Let’s find out more about Super Slopes.

Super Slopes Overview

In Super Slopes you’ll build your own unique ski run by drawing cards from a shared face up display. After selecting your card you’ll place it onto your map in “bricklaying fashion”, either side of an existing card, or top and bottom offset. After each player has drawn a number of cards—dictated by player count—the game ends and scoring takes place.

Selecting a card

When cards are initially placed into the main display, they’re arranged in descending order (based on the number in the top left corner). You may only select a card whose “leg” connects to the ski run which begins at the topmost card. There are 3 exceptions to this rule, based…

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How do you rate a board game like Monikers? Much like Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind, which took an old theatre camp game and committed it to paper, Monikers is a curated rendition of an old favorite. I have always called it Salad Bowl. You may know it as The Name Game, The Hat Game, Celebrities, or a number of other options. How do you review something that’s always been there? How, exactly, does one review Charades?

A Rose by Any Other Moniker

In the traditional game, the first stage involves handing out slips of paper and pens, on which everyone writes a word. These can be famous people, events, concepts, whatever you want, really. Like most party games, the exact parameters are up to the group.

Monikers elides that. The box is full of cards with pre-printed prompts, like Oprah, The Kraken, A Russian Nesting Doll. You know, the classics. From there, the structure is identical to the original game. In lieu of pieces of paper, each player is dealt a pile of cards, from which they choose whichever appeal to them. Those cards are shuffled into a deck, which is set in the…

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Fortitude was the codename for one of the major Allied operations of World War II, with field armies attacking in Norway and Pas de Calais. The Japanese ambassador to Germany believed, before the operation, that forces would then strike across the Strait of Dover. The scale of Operation Fortitude was massive, one of the largest in military history.

You may not have heard about Operation Fortitude in school, and there’s a good reason: it was a dummy operation, made up whole cloth by Allied forces. Operation Fortitude was intended to draw Axis forces away from Normandy in preparation for D-Day. It worked.

Fortitude the game, themed after the operation, bills itself as a solo trick-taker, a fascinating proposition I’ve only encountered in For Northwood!, which I haven’t had a chance to play yet. I was immediately hooked by the idea. How do you translate the muddiness of a trick-taker, the high reactivity of the form, into a solo experience?

Mission Briefing

The goal of the game is to make your way, month by month, through 1943 and into the summer of 1944, the launch of D-Day. You and the German AI opponent take turns playing cards to nine different Tricks, evenly split between fronts in Trondheim and Calais. Each front contains four Tricks, one for each suit in the…

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The many novels of Paige Turner loom large in the collective memory of pulp enthusiasts. Academics may not make much of The Angel of Death or Land Out of Time, but collectors have a lot of love for Turner. Her brisk pacing, her sharp prose reminiscent of a less-refined Chandler, and her efficient character development have won hearts for the past seventy years.

Turner’s central gift was her ability to use tropes without leaning on them. You go into Lady of the West knowing the hardscrabble heroine from the hundreds of times you’ve encountered her before, but Turner’s prose keeps her from feeling worn. You can see her, you can’t see through her. Turner likely felt some sense of kinship for Lady. To paraphrase Lady of the West’s tagline, pulp was a man’s world, and then she came along.

Chapter I: Source Material

[caption id="attachment_275242" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Paperback card market.[/caption]

Paige Turner is the fictitious author responsible for the equally fictitious books showcased on the box for Paperback, Tim Fowers’ 2014 deck-building word game. Paperback is openly modeled on Dominion, Donald X. Vaccarino’s massively influential design. Vaccarino is given thanks in the…

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Resplendent Nature

Are you tired of all the hubbub of city life? Sick of all the constant noise and distractions? It might do you some good to get out of the rat race for a bit and escape to the idyllic countryside. Enjoy the pristine beauty of the countryside, and remember: it’s your responsibility to ensure it stays unspoiled and lush.

Naturopolis is the latest wallet game from publisher Button Shy and is a direct successor in their Sprawlopolis line of games. This game, along with Sprawlopolis and Agropolis and their associated mini-expansions, all feature the same core gameplay mechanics. Either solo or as a duo, you’re working to play cards from an eighteen-card deck and build a landscape of some kind, with different point-scoring mechanisms. Natuoropolis, however, takes a different twist on the theme, focusing on building natural beauty and scenic landscapes, while penalizing you for tainting that beauty with too many roads and asphalt.

[caption id="attachment_272998" align="aligncenter" width="768"] All the contents of Naturopolis fit in this small, wallet-sized folio.[/caption]

Building a Better World

Those familiar with the other games in this series will recognize the gameplay pattern. Setup only takes a few moments. Shuffle all eighteen cards together and pull three off the top. One side…

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