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When I took my first hiatus after four years of running Meeple Like Us, there were a few reasons behind it. One was the workload I had inflicted upon myself. I was covering a game a week, which meant a review and a teardown… but mainly, what it meant was…
Blades in the Dark (2016) – Accessibility Teardown
I have perhaps become a little too emboldened by doing the teardown for Thousand Year Old Vampire. That was a nice, self-contained little creativity exercise that was more amenable to this kind of process than many other RPG systems. And now I’m doing Blades in the Dark which is a…
A Career Ending Talk
For years I’ve wanted to give a talk on imposter syndrome – one that I hope(d) would be useful for students. I got a chance to do it today. …
Blades in the Dark (2016)
You know all those caveats and warnings I put on my review of Thousand Year Old Vampire? Imagine they’re replicated here. The TLDR summary is ‘I don’t really know enough about playing RPGs to be a truly credible commentator and even if I did they’re not really within the scope…
Thousand Year Old Vampire (2020) – Accessibility Teardown
If our review of Thousand Year Old Vampire was an experiment in exploring outside our comfort zone, it’s the laboratory of the accessibility teardown that has the results in which I’m really interested. There are lots of reasons to believe a teardown on a roleplaying system can’t be a useful…
Thousand Year Old Vampire (2020)
This review is a little bit of an experiment in branching out from the site’s core remit. Thousand Year Old Vampire bills itself as a ‘solo roleplaying game of memory, loss and vampires’ and I discovered it largely by accident. One of the things I’m doing this coming academic year…
The Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
Quacks of Quedlinburg is a push your luck game where fortune winks and says ‘Oh wow, you’re so brave, good for you kiddo!’. This, despite knowing full well, that this is gambling with the training wheels on. The risk built into its mechanisms is illusory, and as a result…
The Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018)
I have a number of things that aggravate me about Quacks of Quedlinburg but none are quite so intense as my hatred for whoever named it. I have never once written it down correctly the first, second or even third time. It’s given my spell-checker a stress headache. Whenever I…
Walking in Burano (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
I didn’t really get a lot of joy out of Walking in Burano. It’s one of an awkward class of games to review – ‘games that don’t give you a lot to talk about’. Those that do this kind of work professionally – or even just more diligently than I…
Walking in Burano (2018)
I love the art of Maisherly Chan so much that I will buy a game on its presence alone. Shadows in Kyoto was one such game, although its link to the dense extended universe of the Hanamikoji franchise certainly didn’t hurt. And so we find ourselves here, with Walking In…
Fallout Shelter (2020) – Accessibility Teardown
Fallout Shelter is about as shallow an implementation of the franchise as you can get and still meaningfully be worth the description. It’s a perfectly okay game – three stars of okay – but it feels like such a missed opportunity when far more exciting usages of the licence would…
Fallout Shelter (2020)
For a lot of people, the Fallout franchise is defined by high adventure. It’s about striding out into a broken world and finding ways to change it for the better – or for the worse. For me though, the real magic of Fallout has always been in the Vaults. For…
Inhuman Conditions (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
Inhuman Conditions is an unfortunate game. It’s a brave idea that just doesn’t, at least in my experience, work often enough to be worth playing. It got one and a half stars in our review. But there’s ambition there – a two player social deduction experience was always going to…