Hi. My name is Blake Ramsey. Here you can read board game reviews and book reviews — every one played to the end or read cover to cover before it gets a rating, no exceptions. I also write the occasional essay about the rest of it. Find out more about me, or subscribe by RSS.
Latest board games
A genuinely clever order-based war game buried under a five-hour first play, the kind of thing you respect more than you actually get to the table.
The deckbuilding-as-campaign structure makes every weakness card and every dead investigator feel like it happened to a character, not a stat block.
The best social deduction game I've played by a wide margin, and also the one that asks the most out of whoever agrees to run it.
A booster draft with a civilization built onto it, fast enough that even the seven-player games I dreaded turned out fine.
A genuinely affecting solo experience marketed as a party for six, and the mismatch between those two things is most of what's wrong with it.
An open-world co-op that mostly lives up to two years of hype, though I went in braced for disappointment after watching the pre-release discourse.
Everybody at the table is playing a genuinely different game, which is the whole point and also exactly why the first session is rough.
A tile-laying puzzle that pulls off the rare trick of feeling relaxing and genuinely tense in the same sitting, once you stop treating it as a coloring book.
Everyone is going to call this the Cascadia killer and it isn't quite that, it's its own puzzle, thinkier than it looks and more willing to punish a bad draft.
A solid co-op reskin of a system built for head-to-head duels, and I never fully stopped missing the duels.
Latest books
A pizza delivery driver who moonlights as the greatest swordfighter alive, and somehow the linguistics-as-virus plot is the least ridiculous part of the book.
A biologist-turned-historian's grand theory of why empires rise and fall, genuinely fascinating and occasionally over its own skis.
A journalist's sweeping tour through complex systems, hive minds, and neobiology, dated in its specifics but still right about the shape of the argument.
Seven pilgrims trade stories on the way to meet a monster that might grant a wish or a death, structured like the Canterbury Tales and hitting like a gut punch.
A revenge plot told from the fragment of a warship's mind, and the gender-pronoun choice everyone argues about turns out to be the least interesting thing in it.
A pacifist, all-female water world under threat of conquest, written by an actual biologist, and the ecology is more convincing than the politics it's carrying.
A neuroscientist's attempt at a Hofstadter-style fable about consciousness, more interesting as an experiment in form than as an actual argument.
The last humans in the universe find a planet seeded with an evolution experiment gone sideways, and somehow I end up rooting for the spiders.
Four researchers enter a quarantined ecological zone that the previous eleven expeditions didn't survive intact, and the book's dry, clinical narrator turns out to be exactly the right choice.
A murder mystery in a medieval abbey that keeps interrupting itself with theology and heresy lectures, and somehow that's the part I ended up loving most.
Essays
It's the one piece on the shelf that isn't there for a review, and it's the one I'd actually save first if something ever went wrong.
Why I Read the Last Page First, SometimesIt's not about spoiling the plot. It's about knowing what the author's actually building toward before I sit through three hundred pages of runway.
Monsoon Season Always WinsEvery July the power goes out somewhere in Tucson mid-game, and every July I forget to plan around it until it's already happened again.
The Spreadsheet That Runs My ShelfColumns for player count, session length, and a pass/fail field I definitely stole from work. Priya calls it my other job.
What Regression Testing Taught Me About Replaying Old GamesYou don't retest a system because you think it broke. You retest it because you assume it works and you want proof, which is a completely different mindset than I used to bring to my own shelf.
I Was Wrong About Solo GamingI used to think playing a board game alone was a compromise, something you settled for. This War of Mine is the game that finally made me stop believing that.
I Don't Trust a Board Game Until Its Second PrintingA game's first printing is a beta release wearing a retail box, and I've started treating it that way on purpose.
Teaching Priya Root and Immediately Regretting ItShe picked the Vagabond because the little raccoon looked friendly. Two hours later the friendly raccoon had bankrupted both of the other factions I was also trying to explain.
The Coworker Who Wouldn't Let Arkham Horror GoMarcus asked me one question about the chaos bag over lunch and by the following Friday he'd bought a starter deck and a play mat.
The Bug Report I Never Filed Against a RulebookI found three actual contradictions in a rulebook last month and my first instinct, before I even noticed I was doing it, was to open a ticket.