Before last weekend’s Indianapolis tabletop gaming convention Gen Con, I was skimming lists of the weekend’s most anticipated games and seeing the same-old, same-old: a feudal japan card game, a fantasy role-playing campaign—but a ubiquitous outlier kept catching my eye: Photosynthesis, a game about growing trees.…
Upcoming horror board game Monster Slaughter taps into the best thing about watching campy horror movies: the order in which teens die. Where it one-ups popcorn and The Blair Witch Project is that, in Monster Slaughter, the player is the beast killing off the obnoxious teens.
Kotaku is at the 50th Gen Con in Indianapolis today. Look forward to our coverage of upcoming tabletop games, news and more over the next few days.
When everything in the physical world is getting uploaded onto some great supercomputer in space, you will find me hiding somewhere dark, clinging to my Dungeons & Dragons character sheets. Yes, that’s how much I love playing D&D the traditional way: real dice, real paper and real damn pencils. But Dungeons & Dragons’…
Misspent Youth is a tabletop RPG about young people fighting against authority. Unfortunately, it has a lot of rules, many of which get in the way of the freedom that serves as its core.
Enter the tavern. Bite the plot hook. Go on your righteous journey. Kill the monsters. Fight the boss. Free the town. Rinse, repeat, and rejoice in those experience points. There you have it: the life of a lawful good Dungeons & Dragons character.
Dungeons & Dragon’s cousin, the tabletop role-playing game Pathfinder, is finally primed to get its own dungeon-crawly video game. Last week, Pathfinder: Kingmaker met its Kickstarter funding goal, raising over $500,000, which will furnish the base game with add-ons.
Almost every copy of the first Dungeons & Dragons adventure written by a woman is buried in a landfill in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Dinosaurs are coming to Dungeons & Dragons with its upcoming adventure, Tomb of Annihilation. Slated for a September 19th release, Tomb of Annihilation will have players hacking through a jungle full of undead, dinosaurs and, yes, undead dinosaurs to find a legendary artifact that could quell a curse.
Dungeons & Dragons’ biggest livestreaming event ever goes down tomorrow. Steam of Annihilation will be two days of D&D games played by the game’s designers and big fan personalities. Throughout the stream, publisher Wizards of the Coast will dole out info on D&D’s next storyline.
Three weeks into the release of Amonkhet, the latest Magic expansion, competitive play is tormented by an overpowered combo that players hate for making games feel less strategic and more like spinning a roulette wheel. 2017 has seen more cards banned from Magic’s Standard format than in the past ten years combined,…
Magic: The Gathering is a very good card game that I am very picky about playing. I’m a casual player, more likely to challenge a friend at a bar than attend a local tournament. I’m not about to pore over apps and blogs to assemble some impenetrable, holy deck; I’d rather play Magic: The Gathering like I’d play Rummy…
For some people, board games are only bits of cardboard, wood or plastic. They’re just spaceship models or dungeon maps or dense rulebooks, a bit of fun after a strenuous week at the office. I know they’re more because they helped give me back my wife. After she was critically injured in a car crash, I watched her…
Magic: The Gathering has issued a rare emergency card ban effective today. One card in a popular but dramatically overpowered two-card combo is now illegal in Standard play. Publisher Wizards of the Coast announced Felidar Guardian’s emergency ban two days after they put out their April “Banned and Restricted” cards…
Today, cyberpunk card game Netrunner released a murder mystery expansion, Terminal Directive. It’s a novel twist on an already-fantastic game, and its first story-based campaign. The obvious question: How does a narrative of cyberwarfare unravel through a card game that requires shuffling decks? The answer is, slowly,…
Getting into Dungeons & Dragons can be intimidating. You need maybe three or four other nerds to play with, some pricey tomes full of numbers and tables, ample free time and several dice with as many as 20 sides. It’s a lot to fathom, and even more to set up. How will you find D&D-curious friends? How will you…
My mom loves mystery stories, but I’ve never really seen the appeal. While we both love reading, she likes to puzzle out the mystery as she reads along. I can’t help myself from flipping to the back of the book. Now that I’ve played Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, however, I finally understand the thrill of…
Your ability to enjoy the tabletop game Secret Hitler will likely depend on your ability to laugh as an increasingly impotent progressive coalition fails to halt the rise of fascism. No but seriously, it’s a fun party game.
Rare are the opportunities for Dungeons & Dragons fans to geek out about their favorite character. It’s like explaining your dream to someone. A few seconds in, your poor non-D&D-playing friend’s eyes glaze over in a bored daze.
