I played this game in a single session when i was 20. Took me all night and it was a slog, I think 13 hours. Went to bed, slept, later on that night I played it again but sped through the communication cut-scenes (fast forward was an option, but not a skip). It took under two hours and that included the rather long…

Human Occupied Landfill and Battlelords of the 23rd Century both had good sourcebooks and expansions. The Battlelords version of the Monster Manual did not joke around about monster difficulty.  The Suks-2B-U had a danger rating of about 19 out of 10 skulls with a caption: This is not a mistake, DIE!!!

A game where your character can die during character creation is a lot of fun.

Good to hear. I loved Betrayal and when Cabin in the Woods came out, I told people “there’s a board game of that!” Pandemic S1 did a good job of assuming you knew how to play. It’d be nice if they included a vanilla 1 or 2 episodes to play through with no repercussions if they were going to assume you hadn’t played…

Loved 1, hated 2. I’ve heard very little about Betrayal. We used to play the OG version of it that had a million tokens, so I’m interested in it.  Seafall was...good?...for a while, but it got pretty bloated and became a grind that we didn’t feel got tested much at all.  I love the idea of Legacy games, but have yet…

Something about there was a man trapped on the untwisted conveyor belt, but there were 5 on the twisted conveyor belt, so some brave factory worker made the only choice they could.

There’s a scene in Gangs of New York where Bill the Butcher quickly/barely cooks a hunk of meat and just chows down on it. That always looks good even though I know it wouldn’t be done enough for me.

Yeah I had an old partner hit me up a while back and ask if we could get together for spades but there are like 5 kids between the two of us and it’s hard to justify ditching them for a potentially 7 hour game.
We must’ve had a real harsh rule-set where I learned, because the no trading on nil was a real test of your…

(white guy here) We had the same nil/blind nil rules. Ace-high, but to make it harder we also played 10-for-200, Boston for game (if you got set, you lost the game), minimum team bid (board) of 3, and our special house rule was lowest club in everyone’s hand led. It made that first book a real challenge to bid on,…

Right before St Patrick’s Day, y wife and i were gonna throw a housewarming party so we bought and baked a whole mess (14 lbs or so) of potatoes. Prepared a whole bunch of toppings including green and red chili for the bar. Loaded up on bacon and cheese. Then no one showed up due to social distancing.  We’re still…

The imaginary meal in Hook. Yeah I’m sure it would taste like food coloring and whipped cream, but maybe if you believed hard enough...

For side-scrolling shooters that are reminiscent of the Alien franchise, a game from the 90s called Abuse is hard to beat. Researching genetic testing in a prison always ends well. But the alien-like creatures are hidden in plain sight at times, feral, cunning, and make just the right sounds to add dramatic tension. I…

There is a bunch of stuff in the movie that could be interpreted as either “magic is real” or “this family that was too religious for the Puritans was seeing the supernatural everywhere and were just crazy instead.” But the end comes down so hard on one side, it throws away any suspense built. Like Frailty, but the…

I really disliked the ending of The VVitch for not staying ambiguous.  Loved it up until then.

Their take on the Olympics is perfect.  The close calls, injuries, even cheating scandals, all with the same “I’m gonna care about curling for three weeks every 4 years” kind of intensity.

Horseradish?

I learned recently that my wife had never seen Austin Powers. So I was trying to sell her on the merits of watching it at least once for cultural touchstone knowledge by describing the plot and we discovered that it was, in fact, Demolition Man.

It was interesting. It had a blend of standard “Save the Cat” mediocrity and weird Chinese action set pieces mixed with some mild cultural propaganda.

What about Catherine?  It was a good rental length game, almost achingly simple when it came to mechanics, but crazy and deep and fun.  My wife hated the repetitive narration of your moves and that’s about the only thing keeping me from playing it now.

Do the McElroys have to watch it every Thanksgiving now?