Design Criteria

One of the things I'd like to do here is review games (in particular, wargames and other strongly thematic games). That requires me to have some kind of criteria for evaluating the quality of design choices, which in turn implies that I need to outline some kind of design philosophy to explain the rubric for that evaluation. So here's a set of categories for evaluating whether a particular game has a good design:

1. Player Agency: A common early childhood game model is the roll-and-move, something like Chutes and Ladders (or Snakes and Ladders, if you're a Brit). This kind of game creates a structured experience ideal for young children, but it isn't really "played" in any meaningful sense. Instead, it plays itself without the need for any outside decisions. There are no choices to be made, and so the game lacks player agency.
   
   Providing meaningful player agency is actually tougher than it seems. Just providing choices doesn't suffice. For example, suppose you're on a game show where you get to pick two unmarked doors. One of them has $50 randomly behind it, and the other has $500 behind it. You get to choose the door, but since the selection is based on zero information there's still nothing to "play". You might as well flip a coin. Now suppose, instead, you have two marked doors. Does that provide agency? Not really, since now the correct choice is obvious. That's a trivial choice that might as well be automated and made by default.
   
   But suppose that behind the marked door with $500 there's also an angry rabid badger, and someone just handed you a knife. Now you have meaningful agency, since the choices are nontrivial to rank - based here on your own self-assessment of badger-fighting prowess!
   
   Agency requires intermediate levels of information. If you can't see the chessboard (you have zero information), deciding whether to move the knight or the pawn is just a coin flip. But if you're playing against a deterministic computer program that you wrote yourself (you have perfect information), then you can anticipate how every set of moves will end the game and select only winning moves. There's some optimal intermediate level of information that maximizes agency.
   
   Agency also requires intermediate levels of granularity. If an entire battle is resolved by a single dice roll (low granularity) with odds representing the power of each side, there are no decisions left. But if you need to allocate the firing pattern of each gun on a battleship, then nothing short of a supercomputer will allow you to intelligently predict the outcome of shifting your aim a dozen inches to the right. Again, there's some optimal balance between these extremes.
   
   Some games try to hide their lack of agency by creating the appearance of agency within a narrative that distracts the player from the substantive content of the game. (In RPG circles, this is called "railroading".) This is not always a bad thing, since it can support other aspects of the game that are primarily concerned with theme and narrative (see verisimilitude, below). But this kind of agency deprivation needs to be carefully monitored to make sure that it doesn't violate the social contract of the game, a special problem in the context of RPG and computer games where the social contract often involves a third party (either as referee or as content provider).
   
   
2. Emergent Complexity: You're playing a computer RPG. At level 1, you fight grey rats with 10 health, and do 3-5 points of damage with your dagger. At level 100, you fight neon pink mega-rats with 10,000 health, and do 3000-5000 points of damage with your ion sword. Curses! You've been duped into running on a treadmill!
   
   A very simple game can involve repeating a single task until the point of mastery, but most complex games need a sense of forward progress that rewards you for good task completion. You start in Civilization with a settler caravan, and found a city with a militia defending it. After building for a while, you have a dozen cities, and an army of phalanxes and chariots. A while after that, you have wonders, and ships, and irrigation, and dozens of mechanized armies waging war in every direction. You're playing a game that started simple but became complex while operating under a fixed rule system. This is usually a highly addictive experience.
   
   Complexity can develop in terms of the raw scale of the game. Once a difficult task is mastered, the game asks you to do it three times, all at once. But it's important that the numerical scaling be nontrivial. If you make the same attack with a hundred star dreadnoughts as you do with a single star dreadnought, then the game is just making you roll extra dice after you make the same decision. Adding ships to your star navy needs to open up new tactical possibilities to make the mechanical cost of running the larger naval more than a narrative novelty. A better (but more difficult) model is to allow larger-scale play to include new rules that are inclusive of the old ones, like a strategic scale map that forces you to move around squadrons of 4 to 12 dreadnoughts each using a custom logistic system to engage some of them in coincident battles as part of a larger war in a persistent world.
   
   Another form of complexity is depth of the decision matrix. So, say, initially your warrior has three abilities available each turn: basic attack, dodge, or parry. After you gain a couple levels, you now have two more abilities to choose: power attack, or sweep. Maybe some of these cost you more energy, or can only be used occasionally. The deeper menu of choices forces you to balance more objectives. But if one ability dominates over the others, then it quickly smothers the complexity and reboots the player to a simple game. This is a terrible problem in computer MMOs, where players constantly search for a way to collapse their personal decision matrix back into an "instant win button".
   
   The most difficult form of complexity to manage is dynamic inconsistency, the way in which the relative value of game objectives changes situationally. This is a fairly abstract concept that takes a number of concrete forms, like the changing weight of risk versus reward based on victory criteria. For example, if your opponent is about to win the game on the next turn, it suddenly becomes very appealing to make a high-risk desperation attack! There are many more subtle examples of the same phenomenon, serving to disrupt the usual equilibrium of the game.
   
   
3. Verisimilitude: When used in the narrative sense, this word denotes the faithfulness of a story to the reality it depicts. In game terms, however, it's pretty important to realize that a second layer of simulation is often present. In development of a game's theme, it is often the case that game events are intended to simulate not a reality, but a fictional world (from literature, movies, etc) that is intentionally fantastical. This creates a strange paradox of the game needing to be faithful to something that is intentionally unfaithful to reality. In many cases, actual "realism" can instead become the enemy of that desired fidelity to source narrative, and should be avoided.
   
   The standards for evaluating the quality of a theme's development is another aspect of social contract. If you call your game "Swords and Sorcery", then you suddenly have a player assumption that your game will allow them to replicate the feel of a Howard novella. Every element of the game, not just the title, makes some intangible contribution to shaping the social contract: art, writing style, game mechanics, even the manual's font.
   
   The overall quality of these presentation elements is often less important than their ability to define the social contract in ways that makes the outcome of the game feel satisfying. It's acceptable to have the majority of your local gaming group's Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu adventures end in a spectacular catastrophe. It's probably less acceptable these days to create a Pathfinder campaign that slays multiple characters in the first battle (as my friend Jeff was complaining to me over Christmas break). And if you're a nostalgic DM who wants to haul out an old tournament classic like Tomb of Horrors, it's essential to find ways to communicate to your players that they're about to play the first kind of game, not the second.
   

A couple more concepts that fall under the categories above, which I look for when reviewing a game:

Diminishing returns (DR) is the idea that a particular player choice, if repeated, eventually yields a lower return on investment of resources. Including a DR mechanism is an easy way to balance a game's economy (allocation of resources toward objectives), when it doesn't naturally emerge as a result of competition between multiple players. Many solo or cooperative games absolutely need a strong mechanism of this sort, and will become "broken" if it isn't present. A simple way to enforce DR is create sub-linear relationships between resource investment and outcomes.

Mechanical diversity, the creation of dissimilar rule subsystems for handling dissimilar situations rather than using a uniform design model, tend to boost the verisimilitude of a game at the cost of additional rule complexity. I am usually in favor of this model, so long as the subsystems are comparable in complexity to one another and the enthusiasm doesn't go overboard. Modern game designers often look askance on this approach, but there's something very satisfying about the idea that a land battle should involve a totally different sequence of actions from a naval battle. It also gives the game a rawer, more organic feel that creates flavor and excitement. It also tends to promote asymmetries in dynamic inconsistency, where the player of one strategy responds rather differently to an event than the player of another strategy would.

Binary-Outcome Dice Resolution Methods: Roll-High vs Roll-Low

In many modern games, particularly RPGs and miniature wargames, randomization is represented in the form of a dice roll that has two binary outcomes. This has largely replaced the older model of wargames in which dice results are used to reference a table with a wider range of variable results. For example, many RPGs involve a "skill check" or a "to-hit check" that rolls dice, performs some fixed situational adjustments ("modifiers"), and then returns either a success or a failure for the attempted action.

The general technique is this: (1) Set a target, (2) Roll dice, (3) Perform modifications to the target value and/or the dice roll, and (4) Compare them to one another. But the comparison can be done in one of two ways. In a "roll high" system, the dice result (after modifiers) must be higher than the target. In a "roll low" system, the result must be lower. Although early games often oscillate between each method for different subsystems, modern games usually insist on enforcing one approach or the other uniformly throughout the entire game.

To further complicate the picture, note that the situational modifiers may be applied to either the target or to the roll result - or both! This effectively crates four possible approaches to choose between or combine. Let's suppose we have a 20-sided die, and we want to attempt an action that typically has a 75% chance of success, but in a situation where the odds are improved by an additional 25%. Here are the four equivalent implementations:

1. Roll-low, and modify target: The base target is 10. Any result less than or equal to the target is a success. Give a +5 modifier to the target.
•  Equation: 1d20  ≤  10 + 5
2. Roll-low, and modify result:  The base target is 10. Any result less than or equal to the target is a success. Give a -5 modifier to the result.
• Equation: 1d20 - 5  ≤  10
3. Roll-high, and modify target: The base target is 11. Any result greater than or equal to the target is a success. Give a -5 modifier to the target.
• Equation: 1d20  ≥  11 - 5
4. Roll-high, and modify result: The base target is 11. Any result greater than or equal to the target is a success. Give a +5 modifier to the result.
• Equation: 1d20 + 5  ≥  11 

It's not difficult to confirm that all of these give an identical 75% chance of success. However, that doesn't mean all of them are equally intelligible. To me, the first approach is the only one which makes the success probability obvious to me based on the way it's written. I can easily see that the target (10+5=15) is 75% of the maximum die roll of 20. This strongly predisposes me to method #1. Even method #2 isn't much worse, since it just requires a bit of algebra to slide the negative modifier to the other side of the equation.

The two roll-high methods are more opaque to me. The problem lies with the fact that a target of 6 doesn't look much like a 75% chance of success, on the face of it. Obviously it is, since there are 15 out of 20 results that succeed. But the simple "divide target by max result to find probability" trick no longer applies.

Unfortunately, this system seem to have won for psychological reasons. Rolling high feels more like a "win", since big numbers correspond to higher scores in most sports and games. So clarity is sacrificed for psychological pay-off. This occurs most dramatically in 3rd Edition D&D, where all previously existing roll-low mechanics are rewritten to be exclusively roll-high.

One additional problem with this psychological appeal is that it tends to motivate the system to grow in an unbounded way. Roll-high systems effectively can keep stacking modifiers on both the target and the result, making the situation even harder to interpret. When rolling a 1d20 for a DC32 check (i.e., target of 32) with a +14 modifier to the dice roll, you need to perform two steps of mental algebra just to extract the probability. Quick, perform that operation in your head! What are the odds? Go ahead and grab a pencil and paper, I'll wait.

OK, the result isn't quite that hard. You can subtract that +14 from the target to get 18 (switching to the slightly less confusing method #3), and then recognize that results of 18, 19, or 20 all succeed, for a probability of 15%. But why be forced to do mental subtraction, when you could use method #1 all along?

It's probably too late to eliminate the general preference for roll-high systems. Interestingly, a few games that use percentile d100 rolls have managed to retain roll-low mechanics, suggesting that the real obstacle is that few players today can even due a single division (100%*15/20 = 75%); once the system uses any other dice type, it completely gives up all interest in retaining the intelligibility of its odds.

WANTED: A Good Hex-Crawl Board Game

For the last decade or so, I've been moderately obsessed with the idea of creating (or modifying an existing version of) a hex-crawl board game. This post is an overview of my concept for the project.

First, what is a hex-crawl? The original version of the Dungeons and Dragons product line (the three-booklet boxed set from the early 70s) was essentially four games in one. First, it was a dungeon exploration game, about a small team of adventurers exploring an underground site filled with monsters and treasure. Second, it was a wilderness exploration game, about a troop of adventurers exploring an hostile unknown land, discovering sites that could be explored (as "dungeons" for the first game), but also for the pure joy of discovery and cartography. Third, it was a domain building game, about carving out a fiefdom from the wilderness and building a castle on it, with peasant farmers to defend and a force of loyal knights and mercenaries to defend it. Finally, it was a tactical wargame, with the clash of rival domains being played out on a field of battle with miniatures figures.

Historically, the last part of this sequence was created first. All RPGs were originally derived from a medieval miniature wargame called Chainmail, by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. Gygax's sometime-collaborator Dave Arneson came up with the idea of scaling down the miniature battles to a man-to-man scale, and then discarded the battle entirely to create the dungeon exploration game that eventually evolved into what we'd today call an "RPG". (Then Gygax wrote his own rules and built an intellectual-property empire around them - though that's another story!)

The other two game systems, the wilderness exploration game and the kingdom builder, have mostly been forgotten and underutilized. The term "hex crawl" refers to any game that includes at least the first component, and possibly the second component as well, even if it doesn't literally use the old stand-by trope of a hexagon-grid map.

Quite a few board games have been created to simulate the "dungeon crawl" experienced of a classic RPG. Board Game Geek rates over 100 of them, including Talisman, Descent, Heroquest, Cave Troll, and simple old classics like TSR's Dungeon! and a zillion versions of Munchkin. This reflects, I imagine, the popularity of this theme in the RPG world.

Hex crawls are quite a bit rarer in both the RPG world and the board game world. Unlike dungeon crawls, they tend to use a realistic overland map with terrain features that heavily influence movement and exploration. Unlike 4X strategy games, they usually don't involve moving around a large set of dispersed armies, but focus on the exploits of a single company of heroes that can't be everywhere at once.

I've been trying to keep track of all the hex crawl games I've seen released. All of them have been in the fantasy genre. My rather short list includes:

• Magic Realm: A quite good (but also quite complex) game from 1977.
• Wizards: A similar early game from the same era by Avalon Hill, which I've never played.
• Runebound: A more recent game with good production values, but which frustrated me due to poor playtesting (a similar second edition was released to correct problems, but I've never played it).
• Mage Knight: A popular modern iteration of the genre, with stronger 4X economic components. Rather expensive.

I've specifically excluded games in which terrain is presented more abstractly, or that use a fixed map with little exploration component. Even Runebound is debatable, in that it doesn't have much randomization of map features (although there are additional maps included in expansion sets).

Modern games (including hex crawls) have moved away from simulationist aspects of gaming, preferring to emphasize abstracted mechanics like deck management and tile placement, and lots of theme-heavy "event" cards. While I like most of these features, I find that they tend to eclipse the core mechanics of the game, with the result that the game starts to feel as though it's "playing itself", with only minimal input from the player. In Runebound, for example, dice rolls determine how your hero can move, with the result that you can't enter those mountains unless you roll the right result on the movement dice. In Mage Knight, a deck-building mechanism forces players to draw cards to determine what actions they're allowed to take, creating some turns in which you can't attack, and other turns in which you can't do anything but attack!

My interest is in creating a game that has

• heavy emphasis on exploration and discovery
• intermediate complexity (lower than Magic Realm, higher than Runebound)
• classic flavor that emphasizes unrestricted player agency (no gimmick mechanics)
• reasonable accuracy as a simulation (well, allowing room for some tropes of the fantasy genre)
• the ability to play historical games on real-world maps with more limited fantasy elements
• an appealing solo play option

I've already taken a first pass at writing a set of rules for this. So far it borrows quite a few of its mechanisms from RPGs and computer games.

A small number of recent RPG products have implemented hex crawl elements, including Paizo's Kingmaker and John Stater's Land of NOD series (the latter very much in the tradition of the original Judge's Guild releases). Some computer games (Heroes of Might and Magic, King's Bounty) have explored the same concepts successfully, though often with more limited attention to simulationist concerns. I'm particularly anticipating the release of Expeditions: Conquistador and Meriwether, two computer games under development that seem to export the hex crawl concept to specific historical setting in North America (a very natural fit, given the importance of exploration in early American history). I'd like to find ways to integrate some of the same concepts into a board game that could be played competitively, cooperatively, or solo.

How Impressive is Shadowfax?

For the sake of my own game design interests, I've been thinking about overland movement rates and how they should be set. Most simulation-oriented games (both wargames and RPGs) involve moving units around a map with different types of terrain. The map usually has a well-defined scale, and the number of hexes (or squares, or whatever) that a unit can cover in a single "move" is a reflection of how far that particular unit could supposedly move over some period of time.

As I've been reading the Lord of the Rings aloud to my wife over the last couple years, I've been paying more attention to the distances and times given in the text. Tolkien often emphasizes the exceptional nature of the endurance of his protagonists, and the long distances they travel (often to the point of exhaustion).

Most of these distances match up well with "heroic fantasy" expectations.  Frodo and Sam routinely seem to be able to travel up to 8 leagues (about 24 miles) before needing rest, which almost exactly matches the 24 mile daily movement allowance given in classic 80's era Dungeons and Dragons (looking at the Cook/Marsh Expert rulebook). The pursuit of the Uruk-Hai by Aragon, Legolas, and Gimli involves the more remarkable feat of covering around 130 miles over the course of four days, which prompts Eomer to praise their fortitude. This amounts to movement around 33 miles per day, which would correspond to a roughly 50% increase in movement over the 24 mile "base" allowance. Sure enough, the rulebook allows for a "forced march" option that increases daily movement by 50% (at the risk of possible exhaustion). And that also seems right around the limit of a modern ultramarathon runner's capability of 184 miles in four days (making allowance for the fact that most runners don't carry swords and axes!)

But one curious problem is the speed of Shadowfax, the horse "borrowed" by Gandalf from the stables of Rohan. Shadowfax is described in a variety of superlatives: He can gallop tirelessly, can keep pace with a flying Nazgul fel-steed, and is proclaimed (by Theoden) as the finest horse Middle-Earth will ever see. Here we see the description of Shadawfax's three-day route from Isengard to Minas Tirith:

"Thrice as far as the dwellings of King Theoden,and they are more than a hundred miles east from here, as the messengers of Mordor fly. Shadowfax must run a longer road."

As the crow flies, the distance is 300 miles, but with a detour around the south end of the Misty Mountains, this is probably increased by a few dozen miles more. So call it 360 miles. If Shadowfax covers this distance over the course of three nights, bearing Gandalf and Pippin, then he's covering about 120 miles a night. Over the course of 10 hours, this averages to about 12 miles an hour.

This doesn't seem very fast, does it? For comparison purposes, a top-end modern endurance horse can cover about 100 miles in a day while bearing a load of 300 lbs. That's probably more than a wizard and hobbit combined! So Shadowfax isn't really exceeding a modern Arabian by all that much. Granted, he can do this on three successive days, and in the dark over rough terrain(!), but it hardly represents a supernatural pace of the sort that would prompt the descriptions in the book. Presumably we're witnessing this speed through Pippin's less experienced eyes, just as the size of the Oliphaunt is magnified by Sam's telling.

Compared to an average workhorse, this is still pretty remarkable. Wolseley's 19th century military handbook lists the daily movement of a pack horse at around 16 miles! This seems quite pessimistic, but the logistical complications of moving a large group of horses together (some of them in better health than others) probably limited the speed to that of the slowest animal.

Still, it's hard to know exactly where to set horse movement, for a heroic fantasy game using a small group of mounted riders. Somewhere in the middle seems right. The suggestion of 48 miles per day (from the Expert set) doesn't seem completely unreasonable compared to modern endurance records, and still leaves plenty of room for Shadowfax to be exceptional.

MEK-OP Game Night: Book of War

This week's Book of War scenario saw an undead army facing off against a living force of lawful units. Each side had two players with a 200 point budget each, for a total of 400 points per side. As usual, my bargain-bin approach to mini battles involves using the plastic figures from the War of the Rings game.

For the sake of making the game more interesting, I statted up some higher-level undead (ghasts, mummies, liches, and a couple of dracolich hero types) to throw into the mix, using their attributes from classic AD&D in Gygax's Monster Manual. All of them were difficult to price, being quite vulnerable to certain types of attack but highly resistant to others. In particular, the last three types were given a fear aura, which required melee troops to make a morale check before entering their area. (Unfortunately I set this to 6 inches, when it probably should have been only 3 inches, given the different scale used for mass battles versus tactical RPG combat. This had decisive implications for the outcome.)

As the player for the living side, I selected a ranged-heavy group.

• a Storm Giant hero (for purposes of weather control)
• a war elephant
• 4 horse archers
• 4 longbowmen
• 5 pikemen
• 1 elf medium infantry and 1 halfling slinger (hiding at start)

The other living player went with a large force of light infantry, pikes, and crossbows, and a Knight Renown hero (essentially a mounted level 10 fighter).

The undead side featured a dracolich, a lich, a figure of mummies, three ghasts, and a handful of weaker skeleton archers and melee types. The weather roll was "sunny" (bad for ghasts and optimal for ranged) and the terrain was forest-rich (bad for ranged and good for melee). The terrain was mostly set up across the center of the map, creating a barrier to movement and sight.

Those horse archers are about to be driven off the map by the dracolich hiding in the forest..

Initially the dracolich positioned itself in the forest, driving away a group of horse archers with its (overly large) fear aura. An abortive attempt to kill the dracolich with the storm giant ended in failure, at the loss of the giant. This exchange (over the second and third combat turns) amounted to the loss of about 70 points of lawful units (out of 400) without a single combat roll.

And there they go!

The tide shifted slightly when the war elephant made a suicide charge on the dracolich, successfully eliminating it. The ghasts counterattacked with lethal efficiency.

After the elephant/dracolich exchange.

As the archers crested one side of the central hill, they began mowing down skeletons. With limited movement the skeletons could do little to close the range. A rear ambush from the hidden elf/halfling team provided a short distraction.

As the lich (with a mummy entourage) moved into range of the central hill, it began systematically fearing all the melee type units it encountered. Each failed morale check resulted in a single unit (large formations of infantry and pikes) running away over multiple turns until it could rally itself. Meanwhile the ghasts slowly marched across the hill to join the fray in the forest on the far side.

The battle ended with a valiant charge against the lich by the knight, with the result that both heroes perished. With nothing left capable of defeating the mummies (and their fear aura), we elected to call the game.

In hindsight, the lawful side desperately needed a couple of gold dragons, or maybe a barbarian hero archer, to take down the dracolich and lich/mummy team with dragon fire from the sky. That would probably have swung the battle quickly in the other direction, as ghasts are not priced to be very efficient against large groups of weak enemies.

I'd like to try another undead battle with more reasonably sized fear effects. I'm debating whether the hero types (lich and dracolich) should be priced higher, although their vulnerability to certain types of cheaper heroes (namely, dragons) makes me suspect that this might just create other problems. Fear is extremely powerful against low-level units (5 or fewer HD), but relatively unimportant against heroes. The stronger it is allowed to be, the more difficult it is to balance that kind of specialized ability.

We're still considering what to play next. Proposals include a small Battletech scenario, or maybe something involving naval ship-of-the-line combat. My preference would be to try the rules for Naval Thunder, which seems to be a highly regarded WW2 system. But since I've been choosing the game the last few weeks, I think someone else should take a turn.

Recent gaming group activities

Mu Epsilon Kappa Omicron Pi (MEK-OP, for future reference), the "nerd culture club" here at LeTourneau, plays a variety of different types of games with frequent rotation. Games are usually on Saturday nights (Fridays are reserved for anime, which I know much less about). Usually there is at least one RPG campaign running, and then a side group doing board games. Here's what we've done in the last semester and a half, in (roughly) reverse chronological order:

• Several playtests of the "Book of War" rules from Daniel "Delta" Collins.
• The modern hex-and-counter space strategy game, Space Empires: 4X.
• A number of pocket-sized games from Fantasy Flight, including Red November, Death Angels, and Citadel.
• War of the Ring
• A D&D Next playtest RPG campaign lasting about six weeks, set in a fantasy-world version of Rome.
• A Burning Wheel RPG campaign (which might have stalled out, I'm not sure of its current status).
• A number of other Euro games like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico.

I'm told that last year, there was a full playthrough of the classic first edition AD&D module Tomb of Horrors (yielding 30+ player kills!), which I'm sorry I missed.

I have ambitions, at some point in the future, to play a longer strategy game that can be left up over multiple weeks. I have Magic Realm as a first candidate, if I can find someone willing to wade through the rules with me.

I'd love to invest in a full World in Flames set, for some historical wargame action - something that's hard to find these days unless you take initiative to make it happen! But the entry cost is high enough that I keep delaying in hopes of finding some university club-funding support for the start-up expenses.

Introduction

Hello, all you internets out there! I'm a physics teacher, and I like games. I especially like old games with lots of rules and huge maps covered with hexes. It's hard to find much enthusiasm for that kind of aesthetic these days, but I do the best I can with the opponents I have available.

I'm intending to use this space to discuss topics related to classic strategy and role-playing games from the 70s and 80s. In particular, I'd like to post:

• After-action reports from games with my current group from the Omega Pi chapter of Mu Epsilon Kappa, consisting mostly of students and other members of the university community.
• An ongoing designer diary of my never-ending project to design a good old-school hex-crawl board game (with solitaire, co-op, and competitive modes), one that lets me explore huge maps loaded with old ruins and dangerous monsters.
• Permanent links to all the interesting material I've read on other sites, and then subsequently forgotten how to find again.
• Reviews of the various games I've played, for the interest of anyone else searching for information about them.