2026-10-06
Board Games Like League of Legends: Trials of MAYA
For board games like League of Legends, Trials of MAYA borrows lane pressure and champion builds and makes them work without a screen.
Maren Hollis
2026-09-07
Why Positioning Matters in Grid-Based Board Games
Grid based board games make one promise: the square you are standing on is a decision. Whether they keep it depends on a handful of design choices that are easy to describe and surprisingly easy to get wrong.
2026-08-28
Ted Chiang-Sized Ideas in a Dune-Sized World: The Case for Philosophical Blockbuster Science Fiction
Science fiction cinema often treats ideas and spectacle as if they compete for screen time. The best blockbusters prove they don't have to.
2026-08-18
Terraforming Mars
Building an engine of corporations, cards, and parameters that slowly turns Mars green, and I read Red Mars right before playing this again, which was a genuinely strange way to experience both.
2026-07-30
A Wrinkle in Time
Rereading the book that made me weird about tesseracts as a kid, this time as an adult who's spent years reading actual physics-adjacent nonfiction. It held up better than I braced for, and differently than I remembered.
2026-07-17
A Door Into Ocean
An all-female, biologically engineered ocean society faces invasion by a violent, hierarchical planet next door, and answers with organized, deliberate nonviolence instead of a counter-army. Quietly one of the strangest, most patient books I've read this year.
2026-07-13
Race for the Galaxy
A tiny box holding one of the densest engine-building games I own, entirely icon-driven with almost no text on the cards, and a genuinely brutal first few plays before the fog lifts.
2026-07-12
Why Physical Books Still Win in This Apartment
Callum's been trying to get me onto an e-reader for two years, citing shelf space alone in a two-bedroom apartment where one room already doubles as the game closet. I keep buying paperbacks anyway, and I finally sat down to work out why.
2026-07-11
Why I Won't Play a Game Solo
Half my shelf ships with a solo mode now, an automa deck, a bot AI, a whole separate rulebook for playing against the box, and I own maybe four hundred hours of it I have never once opened. A small, probably contrarian case for leaving it there.
2026-06-16
What Ridgeline Books Will and Won't Take
A few blocks from the apartment is a used bookstore that's genuinely picky about what it accepts for trade, and getting to know its owner's exact taste over six years has taught me more about honest self-editing than I expected from a hobby errand.