Category: Reviews

Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Warfare really isn’t that hard. It has an undeserved reputation for being byzantine and difficult to parse and put into practice.  A reputation that, now that I have a dozen games under my belt, makes a lot more sense. Chainmail is a game written to be...

I like it. Late last year I finally got around to ordering a couple of titles from the Wiley Games lineup. Having missed out on the hardback omnibus fantasy project, and curious about how Jay Wiley handles procedural, by which I mean random table generated, dungeon generation, my first...

In this movie a plague kills most of the adults leaving the children largely untouched.  But if you scare a kid you can milk him for a cure that is totally not adrenochrome. They always have to tell you what they are doing. The first film in the series...

The channel, The Joy of Wargaming, continues to make inroads into the wargaming community.  Now with more than 1,400 subscribers, brave souls not yet scared off by my frequent sojourns into topics that we aren’t supposed to discuss, and more of the newcomers expressing thanks for a non-converged alternative....

I’ll watch any movie that has Mel Gibson in it.  At this point in his career, they aren’t all winners, but at this point in the lifecycle of Hollywood they don’t have to be.  They just need to not insult me. Boss Level is not a great film, but...

Let’s take a moment to bask in the majesty of this self-own. Dr. Bob here writes po-faced apologetic books about the American military that sell like sand at the beach.  Here, he criticizes a publisher who is guilty of committing the grave sin of preserving Western Culture by publishing...

Way back in 1968 E. C. Tubb published a fun little stand-alone adventure, The Winds of Gath, featuring a laconic space traveler named Earl Dumarest.  Terse, punchy, and full of tension, it read like a Dashiell Hammett novel, complete with political intrigue, wealthy dames in trouble, and the kind...

We know. Film-makers have a real problem these days because Hollywood – and the BBC even moreso – can’t recognize the good from the bad. It’s not just this meme: It’s something far deeper. First off, we should clarify what we mean by “modern spy thrillers”.  Not “set in...

Gave a BBC period piece a shot, and it was okay. If you know what it is, I don’t have to name it.  If you don’t know what it is, then I don’t want to name it. Speaking generally, it’s a spy show in which we are supposed to...

So this was a bust. Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order.  I’ve been painting a LOT of figures for miniature wargames lately, and chewed through most of what YouTube has to offer a hobbyist in my preferred genres.  That means trawling the muck of streaming services for...