Nick Dubs

I’m pretty over pure deck builders. I’ve been playing them since the OGs Dominion, Ascension, and Thunderstone came out in the late 2000’s, and as a result, I’ve developed an instinct for how to play them optimally. With the majority of deck building innovation integrating it

Recently, I started watching The Wire for the first time. I know, I should have watched it forever ago, but it was just one of those things that everyone kept telling me was great but I never got around to. Honestly, I think that because it’s more about the

I’m really not a fan of co-op games. There are a couple exceptions, like Gloomhaven and The Crew, but they are few and far between. Being forced to work together to solve a game always feels artificial and boring to me, and they trend towards either being easily solved

As the market for gateway games becomes increasingly flooded, publishers have to find a way to make their titles stand out from the crowd. For Cape May, Thunderworks attempted the flagship economic gateway title, an intersection of gaming categories that’s already rather rare. Every part of the design and

I walked away from my base game Crusaders review feeling there was a good game in there somewhere, but there were too many pain points for me to like it. Now that I’m reviewing the expansion, the question is: does it transform the ugly duckling into a swan? Well,

The moment I opened That Time You Killed Me, I had a bone to pick with it. Like most board gamers, I have a ritual around my new games. I had moved my office table and opened my drawer of baggies, ready to punch some cardboard and organize the bits

Crusaders wears its inspiration on its sleeve. In the rule book, Seth Jaffee stops just short of naming Feld’s legendary Trajan and its core rondel mancala hybrid mechanic. Trajan is the heaviest of heavy euros, with its six separate subgames and multi-colored mancala tokens that activate bonuses if they

Racing is a weird genre in board games. It feels as if one day in the last decade all the big names got on a conference call and agreed that racing is for filthy casuals, because, with a few noticeable exceptions, racing games have been the hobby’s red-headed stepchild.