Flamecraft – Cute Little Dragons Invade Your Tabletop
These dragons aren’t just adorable, they’re industrious In Flamecraft, you oversee a village where dragonish artisans pry their trades. It’s a competitive—but cozy—worker-placement and resource management game balancing the production of resources with spending...
Future tech sample platter (CES 2026)
Some of the future is on sale, but it’s expensive Every year, the future gets a little bit closer. Some of it arrives. A few bits and pieces fade from new and exciting to standard fare. But one yearly tradition in January has us looking just over the horizon at...
Year 13 of My 5-10 Year Overnight Success Plan
Guess what time of year it is? It’s time for your favorite(?) tormentor of the English language to harass the number system for a while. Yeah, we’re a few years past the end of the runway, but I somewhat explicitly mentioned that overnight success was going to take a...
Modern Christmas Mythos
Elves as special forces and low-orbit space sleighs? The year is 1823. James Monroe is president of the United States (of which there are presently 24 total). The steamship is all the rage and the height of modern technology. And an American author pens a poem called...
Free Birds
The SciFi Thanksgiving Holiday Special You’ve Been Missing Every December, and even a little bit before, the world is awash in Yuletide cheer. Every store is decorated whether it’s brick-and-mortar or an app. Christmas songs. Community events. Your Netflix...
The Halloween Tree
Two sci-fi giants, one spooky Halloween classic Well, it's that time of year again. Candy. Costumes. Holiday specials airing nonstop for a month. Wait. What was that last one? Technically, there aren't a ton of Halloween movies (not counting the Halloween(tm) series...
Shardlight
Come for the mystery, stay for the atmosphere of this point-and-click dystopian adventure with serious vibes. 2016’s Shardlight is a post-apocalyptic game that immerses you in a dying world after a WWIII-like catastrophe. Exactly what happened to cause this world...
Princess Bride
Low-Magic Fantasy? Inconceivable! How a classic tale dodges fantasy’s biggest trap. Magic system. Magic system. Magic system. Start a conversation with a fan about a fantasy world they haven’t heard of, and those two words are bound to come up in short order. The Dark...
AI-Assisted Archaeology
How to build a better archaeologist. AI needed a hobby, and this could be it. Between roughly fifteen hundred and twenty-two hundred years ago, in the Peruvian desert, the Nazca lived and worshiped. Also, they graffitied the hell out of that desert. By selectively...
Dwarf Fortress – now with UI!
The Dwarfiest Dwarves Who Ever Dwarfed, Now Accessible to Non-Zealots Dwarf Fortress is the quintessential fortress management game. A two-person indie project first released in 2006, it was notorious for its intensely detailed simulation, wacky emergent behaviors,...