Dan Thurot

There is no board game drama like TTRPG drama, and for that I am grateful.

Lovely!

Broken Clocks The consensus on Take Time, the abstract teamwork game by Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière, seems to be that it’s Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind but Even More, which means, mercifully, t…

The consensus on Take Time seems to be that it's The Mind But More. In a landmark moment, I... totally agree with that take! My review: spacebiff.com/2026/02/06/t...

obviously I like it better when Dan loves my games than when they leave him cold, but it's still a pleasure to read his reviews, which engage thoughtfully with the game & understand what I was trying to do with it

Haha yeah

I didn't know I needed to. ='(

Thanks for the recommendations! I liked the first EL, but I haven't gotten the second. I try to avoid early access. I also heard it wasn't great? But in any case, I don't really want to consider it until it's properly released.

Ew that sucks. That makes me not want to get it ever. Have they moved in that direction?

now it says I've failed a captcha test aaaaaa send help

Shuss, you know what makes this even weirder? This is the form for an openly Christian publisher, haha. Probably not *weird* Christian, but it isn't like I actually know that.

The prickly modes are the best part, for sure.

A publisher form that reads: "Demographic Info - (required). Please tell us a little bit more about your reach and your community." My response reads: "I have a number of readers; something like XXX subs on my site (including email subs), XXX daily non-email reads depending on whether I've published something, XXX followers on BlueSky. I don't know how to describe my community. Suburban, I suppose. Not very demographically diverse. Pretty religious, although that's changed dramatically in recent years."

Look, I get it. If I responded with "I host a space that emphasizes quantity over safety and mealy-mouthed neutrality over taking a stand on even the most basic of moral issues," you might mistake my little site for the Dice Tower.

That doesn't mean I know how to answer the question.

Publisher media forms ask some really weird questions these days.

"How big is your viewership?" isn't as straightforward to answer as you might think, but "Tell us about your community" really baffles me. I have a community? I'm just some jackass on the internet.

Hot Cross4 Buns Back when I was in the dating pool — the late Pleistocene, oh ho ho — I would sometimes tell women that my only qualification for a life partner was somebody I could “play boggle in bed&#8221…

Amabel Holland's cross4 is a crossword-making game that's more impressive as an artifact of nostalgia with a few modern touches than as a modern board game in its own right. My review: spacebiff.com/2026/02/05/c...

Thanks for the recommendation! I've played quite a bit of Humankind... part of my interest in Civ7 is for compare-and-contrast reasons. I think multi-civ is a smart direction, so I'm curious how different studios handle the concept.

I'm sure $42 isn't a lot to many people. But for those of us working a spouse through school, it's hard to justify that much on a game that's put up so many hackles.

I am so insanely curious about Civ7. In part because so many people hated it, which is a great way to communicate that it's doing something interesting.

But also, I could buy like five weird indie games for that much.

me: oooh Civ 7 is finally on sale!

me two seconds later: geez it's still 42 dollars

I've been playing this game, and it is wild in a way that will not appeal to most people, but absolutely appeals to me.

Thanks!

If you're curious about why I keep making tabletop games, you'll probably enjoy listening to this podcast episode! Although, I'm not sure if I actually managed to answer that question...

Space-Cast! #53. Scratch & Listen Most people know Zach Barth as the founder of Zachtronics, purveyor of digital playthings such as SpaceChem, Opus Magnum, and EXAPUNKS. But we are not most people. Instead, we’re here to spea…

Most people know Zach Barth as the founder of Zachtronics. But we are not most people. Today on the Space-Cast!, Zach talks about his analog designs, including The Lucky Seven, Chemistry Set, and the scratch-off puzzle pack Zach Attack! Listen here: spacebiff.com/2026/02/04/s...

Yeah, it's 99% the same game, so that tracks.

A fantastic review of a game that’s been making a lot of top 10 lists. Ricky was also the designer of the solo version of Nature and it was a pleasure to work with him.

Um. No. It was not.

DoS That LLM Till It’s 404 There’s history to Deckers. Pedigree. Richard Wilkins — better known by the epithet Ricky Royal, the name under which he’s created a bunch of incredible solitaire modes for games that w…

As a remake of Renegade, Deckers is a mild tune-up; as a throwback to a time when cooperative games were tougher and more tangled, it's a welcome addition to the modern co-op pantheon. My review: spacebiff.com/2026/02/03/d...

Fantastic review of One-Hit Heroes.

One-Hit Wonder Whether in video games or board games, there’s a certain zen — is it okay to call it zen? — that washes over you when you only have one hit-point left. Now it’s just you and your skills…

One-Hit Heroes is a rapid-fire boss battler with a great rhythm, letting players tackle four bosses in sequence. My main complaint is that I want more of it. My review: spacebiff.com/2026/02/02/o...

I really like Almighty. I believe it's still being developed, but it's balance stuff rather than conceptual.

Slaughter in the Grove! My 12yo announced it was much better than The Haunting of Creech Manor. (Probably because it is.)