Maren Hollis writes long-form book and board game reviews and the occasional personal essay about reading, gaming, and the life around both.https://marenhollis.com/en-UShttps://marenhollis.com/articles/terraforming-mars/https://marenhollis.com/articles/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.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTTerraforming MarsMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/a-wrinkle-in-time/https://marenhollis.com/articles/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.Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTA Wrinkle in TimeMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/a-door-into-ocean/https://marenhollis.com/articles/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.Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTA Door Into OceanMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/race-for-the-galaxy/https://marenhollis.com/articles/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.Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTRace for the GalaxyMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/why-physical-books-still-win-in-this-apartment/https://marenhollis.com/articles/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.Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/why-i-wont-play-a-game-solo/https://marenhollis.com/articles/why-i-wont-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.Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/what-ridgeline-books-will-and-wont-take/https://marenhollis.com/articles/what-ridgeline-books-will-and-wont-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.Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/dwellings-of-eldervale/https://marenhollis.com/articles/dwellings-of-eldervale/A worker placement and area control game dressed up in genuinely gorgeous horror-fantasy art, where the interesting decision is which of five overlapping ways to score you commit to. Plays great at two, which mattered a lot to me.Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTDwellings of EldervaleMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/from-bacteria-to-bach-and-back/https://marenhollis.com/articles/from-bacteria-to-bach-and-back/Dennett's case that minds get built the same way evolution builds everything else, by dumb, blind, cumulative tinkering, no architect required. Long, occasionally smug, and I underlined half of it anyway.Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTFrom Bacteria to Bach and BackMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-secret-of-our-success/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-secret-of-our-success/Joseph Henrich's argument that culture, not raw brainpower, is the thing that actually made humans dangerous. I went in skeptical of the thesis and came out rearranging how I think about basically everything.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Secret of Our SuccessMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-forty-minute-ritual/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-forty-minute-ritual/Every night, roughly forty minutes, the same lamp I've had since grad school, before bed, no phone in the room. A close look at a habit I've never actually examined until I tried to explain it to someone else.Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/mage-knight/https://marenhollis.com/articles/mage-knight/Vlada Chvatil's deckbuilding exploration game, where every choice compounds into the next and a single misjudged turn can quietly cost you the whole session. The hardest game I own and the one I keep coming back to.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTMage Knight Board GameMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-notebook-i-keep-of-everything-ive-finished/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-notebook-i-keep-of-everything-ive-finished/A small paper notebook, one line per book or game, no elaboration, that I've kept for years for reasons I didn't examine until I actually flipped back through the whole thing at once.Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/kemet-blood-and-sand/https://marenhollis.com/articles/kemet-blood-and-sand/The remaster of the Egyptian-mythology area control classic, tighter and meaner than I remembered the original being, with monster cards that turn every army into a genuine gamble the moment it crosses into contested territory.Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTKemet: Blood and SandMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-editing-brain-does-not-clock-out/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-editing-brain-does-not-clock-out/Nine years of copyediting other people's manuscripts has apparently rewired how I sit through a game rules explanation, and I only noticed how badly when I started correcting a friend's teach out loud, unprompted, mid-sentence.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/vantage/https://marenhollis.com/articles/vantage/A modular, exploration-driven survival game from the Roll for the Galaxy team, gorgeous to look at and genuinely inventive in its map-building, but it never quite locked in the way I wanted it to.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVantageMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/red-mars/https://marenhollis.com/articles/red-mars/The First Hundred land on Mars and immediately start fighting about what kind of civilization to build. Slow, political, occasionally a geology textbook, and I loved almost all six hundred pages of it.Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTRed MarsMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-rings-of-saturn/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-rings-of-saturn/A man walks along the Suffolk coast and the book drifts, without ever quite announcing a transition, from herring fishing to the Congo to silk production to Borges. No plot, barely a narrator, and I could not put it down.Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Rings of SaturnMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/i-was-wrong-about-kingmaking/https://marenhollis.com/articles/i-was-wrong-about-kingmaking/For years I treated any game where a losing player could hand the win to someone else as a broken game. A specific bad night playing The Old King's Crown made me actually examine that opinion instead of just repeating it.Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-trial/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-trial/Josef K. gets arrested for a crime nobody will name and spends the rest of the book trying to navigate a legal system that has no interest in explaining itself. Read it in one sitting and felt actively unwell afterward, in the good way.Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe TrialMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/teaching-arcs-to-my-sister-at-thanksgiving/https://marenhollis.com/articles/teaching-arcs-to-my-sister-at-thanksgiving/I brought my favorite game of the year home for the holidays, taught it badly to someone who does not play games, and learned something about the difference between a game being good and a game being a good first game.Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-old-kings-crown/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-old-kings-crown/A bluffing and hidden-role game of royal succession dressed in beautiful storybook art, better as a light social evening than as a strategy game, and I think it knows that about itself, mostly.Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Old King's CrownMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/revelation-space/https://marenhollis.com/articles/revelation-space/An archaeologist, a conspiracy-minded cyborg captain, and a nine-hundred-year-old assassin all converging on a dead alien civilization that seems to have exterminated itself on purpose. Cold, huge, and paced like a glacier with a grudge.Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTRevelation SpaceMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/cloudspire/https://marenhollis.com/articles/cloudspire/A tower-defense-meets-skirmish game with a genuinely clever bag-building combat resolution system, buried under a rulebook and setup process that punish anyone without a dedicated table.Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTCloudspireMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/arcs/https://marenhollis.com/articles/arcs/Cole Wehrle's trick-taking-meets-area-control space opera, where alliances form and break constantly and the game genuinely rewards reading the table over optimizing a spreadsheet. My favorite new release in years.Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTArcsMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/too-many-bones/https://marenhollis.com/articles/too-many-bones/A dice-builder RPG where your character's dice themselves gain new faces as you level up, and the components are so absurdly premium it borders on excessive. Genuinely one of the best two-player campaign experiences I've played.Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTToo Many BonesMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/six-years-of-asheville-fog/https://marenhollis.com/articles/six-years-of-asheville-fog/I moved from flat Ohio farmland to a mountain town for a job, and the thing nobody warned me about wasn't the hills, it was how differently a fog rolling through a valley makes you feel about staying in on a weeknight.Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-cultural-origins-of-human-cognition/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-cultural-origins-of-human-cognition/Tomasello's earlier, denser case for the same territory Henrich and Dennett cover more readably, this time from a developmental-psychology angle, and specifically about joint attention as the hinge everything else swings on.Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTThe Cultural Origins of Human CognitionMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/supersizing-the-mind/https://marenhollis.com/articles/supersizing-the-mind/Andy Clark's extended-mind argument, that your notebook and your phone and the layout of your kitchen are doing real cognitive work, not just storing it. Convincing thesis, exhausting delivery.Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTSupersizing the MindMaren Hollishttps://marenhollis.com/articles/the-manuscript-that-taught-me-to-slow-down/https://marenhollis.com/articles/the-manuscript-that-taught-me-to-slow-down/Three years into copyediting I nearly cut a sentence a first-time author needed, because it broke a rule I'd stopped questioning. What actually happened afterward changed how I do the job.Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayMaren Hollis