Deathwatch

Dark Heresy’s (DH) religious fervour and Rogue Trader’s (RT) epic starships have already delivered high quality, ‘rules heavy’, battle games for Tabletop RPG groups. Deathwatch is the third core rule book in the 40K Tabletop RPG series and it’s due out shortly. Time to join the ranks of the genetically-enhanced, Uber-Space Marines of [...]

BBC Helps Out Bloggers

Games designers, bloggers, self-publishers and teachers/ lecturers might want to take a look at the free training materials for journalists released by the BBC.

The BBC’s own journalists use the same resources and they offer as high a quality of web content and ‘inside knowledge’ as you’re likely to come across on [...]

Christmas 2009: 11+

There’s often a thin line between boardgames and ‘bored games’. Too competitive, too long and too slow are some of the fairly frequent difficulties that can ruin gameplay. The rules also tend to be read like they’re set in stone, and it’s tricky to apply working fixes unless you’re used to the kind [...]

Rogue Trader

Rogue Trader is a standalone follow-up to the excellent but ‘rules heavy’ tabletop RPG Dark Heresy. This time round players are invited to take the part of interstellar traders, though not in the manner of a ‘rules light’ space adventure system like Traveller.

There’s no scraping together the money for a crumbling [...]

Graphic Novels To Die For: Part 2

300 by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

The 300 is based more on the Hollywood movie of the same name than exact historical details of the battle at Thermopylae. Nevertheless, it presents a dramatic account of how Leonidas and his Spartans stood against King Xerxes’ massive Persian army. Miller’s composition and execution [...]

Graphic Novels To Die For: Part 1

Charley’s War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun

Charley’s War had a dramatic effect on publishers produced battle comics in the UK between the 1950s and the 1980s. The comic’s setting in World War 1 was an indication of what Mills and Colquhoun had in mind, as they turned away from the [...]

Graphic Novels To Die For

Plenty of games owe a debt to comic books and graphic novels, which provide a regular source of new ideas and inspiration for game designers and artists. The time when comic books were just for kids is long past and many games have been influenced by, or based on, ideas and [...]

Sims 3: No More Homework

Well not so much homework. Sims 2 and its many add-ons have sold millions of copies but the franchise was definitely due for an update. Too many repetitive tasks, impossible targets, ‘more of the same’ expansions and moody Sims have made each successive Sims 2 expansion more tired than the last.

The [...]