• Endies 2025

    I. Dear Reader, People are posting about their favourite games of the year (regardless of when they were released) using the term Endies 2025. I did this last year but Endies does have a certain ring (maybe a worse ring) than Games of the Year so let’s try it out. Here’s what I got: One-Shot…

    Thomas Manuel

  • Holiday Mode

    I. Dear Reader, I wrapped up two games this week: The Defy the Gods game that has been going on since July. It ended really triumphantly, appropriately bombastic and dramatic and fun — everyone got what they wanted out of it for their characters and the story. I also wrapped a four session run of…

    Thomas Manuel

  • Subjectivity

    I. Dear Reader, One of the things I figured out this year is that writing about games is a celebration of subjectivity, of personal experience. There’s been a long semi-academic debate about how to review games (going back at least to Robin Laws’ essay The Hidden Art) and I think I let it trick me…

    Thomas Manuel

  • List of Lists

    I. Dear Reader, I don’t know if it’s just me but even though it’s mid-November, I’m already in end-of-year mode. My two regular tables seem to reflect that as well. One went on hiatus till the new year. The other is still going but we’re hitting what will probably the last session of our god-killing…

    Thomas Manuel

  • Media Week

    I. Dear Reader, It’s a media-heavy issue this time as I catch up on weeks of people releasing stuff to watch and listen to. There’s actually so much media that I’ve decided to save some reading links for next week. I hope you’re all doing well and thanks for reading! Unreasonably confident that next week…

    Thomas Manuel

  • Two Weeks In One

    I. Dear Reader, It finally happened. I missed a week of the newsletter. I don’t know if I’ve unintentionally skipped a week ever in the five years I’ve been doing this. Given that, I want to take it seriously. I don’t like admitting I’ve spread myself too thin but that’s basically what happened. Normally, I…

    Thomas Manuel

  • Big Reveals

    I. Dear Reader, A while ago, I wrote about an Apocalypse World: Burned Over game that I was running. My players decided that they wanted to kill the psychic maelstrom and that led to a series of conversations where we skipped forward in time into a world where those initial characters had succeeded. The new…

    Thomas Manuel

  • October Roundup

    I. Dear Reader, It’s a day late and just the links this week because I had another extremely busy weekend. On top of everything else, I’m househunting and that has ended up being more physically and emotionally taxing than I thought. I’ll catch you next week! Yours housingly, Thomas II. Media of the Week III.…

    Thomas Manuel

  • Shadowrundown

    I. Dear Reader, Last Monday, I published a 4000+ word half-report, half-essay about Shadowrun on Rascal News. The big thing that the article does is talk about how there’s a lot of negativity about Shadowrun as a game but the more I asked around, that negativity seemed to actually be about how the publisher Catalyst…

    Thomas Manuel

  • Almost About Challenge

    I. Dear Reader One of the big things I’ve been meaning to talk about for a very long time is seemingly large divide between people who want their games to be about overcoming challenge and people who don’t. This is tricky to talk about because it’s a conversation about, among other things, language and psychology.…

    Thomas Manuel