INTRO
I have, as I believe I have alluded to in the past, personally curated a group of local(ish) friends to read games with over the last year. They are, by and large, people who have suffered the same curse that I did - people who only ever knew Dungeons & Dragons or perhaps one of its offshoots because that's just what everyone played, and who never really knew anyone who had any other books. A rare few came to this already as game designers, having some projects under their belts (honestly, more than I have frankly). Some, like myself, are avid podcast aficionados and have learned of some games this way - many, unfortunately, have the particular mélange of neurospices that make listening to actual plays literal actual Hell for them and so just haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to other games. All of these folks, however, have two things in common: they know me, and they know I've got an unstoppably huge backlog of games to get through. What is pictured above is most of the games I own IRL - I've left out most of the D&D specific books, and of course most of those zines haven't been properly filed.
With the season of unchecked capitalism upon us (read: Black Friday & the push for buying games for folks for the holidays), I felt like I should run down the games we've read this year and give you some mini reviews in hopes of inspiring you to purchase them for yourself or for others. I don't have any affiliate links or anything, nothing you click in this will give me any money - I'm just doing it for the love of the game(s) and shilling for stuff I like. In no particular order, we have:
Look, you had me at "queer disco cosmic horror." This is a game I ran at PAXU in 2024 (a thing which the game's creator mentioned might be the first time it's been run at a con not by him? And if that's the case, I need y'all to step up here okay), have loved GnomeAnne's 4-part AP of it, and generally wish I had more chances to run for folks. In terms of what you do in this game, you and your fellow players are queer weirdoes living in a beach bungalow in a seaside resort town in the 70s. It's a homonormative, lightly magical, and very mysterious alternate 1970s setting that lets you investigate supernatural mysteries - some of which might be your fellow players! My favorite prewritten adventure I can only describe to you as "Warlock Berghain." I love the dice pool system - one you don't really see in other games, where you're building a pool, rolling, and assigning dice to various tables to see what results you get which really lets you dial in your varying level of success in a narratively interesting way. Roseville Beach lets you go as silly or serious with the horror as you like - it's a really excellent and versatile game.
Salvage Union is a game I am so Normal and Neurotypical about that I have literally reactivated my locked Twitter account to go pull up a thread I posted to put into this post because I forgot to delete Twitter before it got scraped for AI - a thread in which I went to bat for Salvage Union because I was so tired of people saying "Oh it's just another mech game that's all about combat." Salvage Union is a game that DOES let you do mech combat, yeah. It's also about building a community to live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland dotted with corporate arcologies, a sea of zombifying nanites, kaiju, raiders, and simple folk who are just trying to stay alive. It's about being a part of a union fighting against those who would tear you down and either wipe you out or use you as just another cog in their machine. The three pre-written adventures have you either dealing with corpo espionage, horrible kaiju meat-mechs, or a cold war where people fight to control the bountiful and extremely dangerous resource that is the aforementioned nanites. Or you can just go off and do your own thing, man! Do a Borderlands With Mechs if you want to. Or a Fallout With Mechs. Or a Zoids But With Non-Animal Mechs. Or anything else your heart desires honestly! It's a cool game.
Triangle Agency
Triangle Agency rules. Full disclosure, I've been hooked on this sauce from the very beginning: as a gift to myself back when the Kickstarter was running, I backed this at one of the highest levels so I'd get a chance to play with Caleb, I got to bring some podcast friends along, it was great. I've since run this on-air for The QueerXP, and I've run it off-air a few times including an as-yet unfinished mission I wrote prior to the game coming out. But why do I like it? For the reason I think a lot of people get it wrong - this is a game about your fundamental understanding of how you interact with the world, both in and out of game. It is a game that, if you break the rules and start reading beyond the playwall and you go read all the GM tips on how to run the game, forces you to reconcile with exactly how games work in a way that I personally have not been challenged before. This is a game that does require some GM prep, yes, but it is also an onboarding manual for helping players think more creatively and fill in the world with you via its "Ask The Agency" move, a move in which a player presents a causal chain for a thing they want to exist in the world to be true, and then there's some input from the table about it and then they roll to see the impact. I have now started playing almost every other game like Triangle Agency - not that I get to Ask The Agency and reshape reality in every game, but rather the same kinds of questions I would engage with when thinking about using that move are ones I'll ask the GM. If the GM hasn't established something, it's in a quantum state until they do - if a game doesn't let you mechanically assert your own narrative about it, the next best thing you can do is ask the GM! This is a thing that I think that people have done for ages in a sloppy way - the "rule of cool" argument can be somewhat of a large club swung around rather than a precise and delicate masonry hammer - and I think that by filtering this tendency through the prism of Triangle Agency, you learn to be better at other games.
Also there's a bunch of cool weird shit you get to do that lets you be an absolute horrifying freak. I don't know what else to tell you here, if you haven't already bought it I'm going to roll to Ask The Agency to have made your [benefactor/trusted adult of choice] get it for you.
Moonlight on Roseville Beach
Ryuutama
Ryuutama is the game that actually made me start this whole bookclub thing, because I knew I needed to read it and yell about it with someone. Finding out it had already been out in America for almost a decade and yet I had NEVER heard about it blew my mind. There was a very recent video promoting it, and it does seem like periodically someone like myself will pick it up, yell about how nobody seems to have heard of it and then it falls back to obscurity, and I think that's a real shame. Especially with stuff like Fabula Ultima catching on recently, a game like this can really shine. It is, at its core, a game of not playing heroes, but rather people who are off on their One Great Journey in their life. There's all kinds of collaborative worldbuilding things in it and some very special things for GMs to do including building their own GMPC which may or may not directly affect a session - a lot of choices make sense when you realize that the author is/was a teacher, and used this as a game to teach people the fundamentals of roleplaying games. I do find it strange where it decides to get into the crunch, mainly on the overland travel rules, but I suspect this is a holdover from D&D's export to Japan and certain aspects of it simply sticking around in the Japanese game design space whereas we in the US had chosen other aspects, but I'm not educated enough on this to make definitive statements - regardless, it is a very easy game to pick up and play, and while certain elements may see part and parcel for a lot of modern fantasy adventure games, the fact that this did this a decade ago is something to be noted. There are nuggets of wisdom to be gained here.
Also, and again, cannot stress enough I do not make money from this, but I cared about this game enough to take part in a community zine and created a sort of Shaman King-y, DanDaDan-y class you can play along with including some advice for running games with death and the undead as a more prominent element. I think everyone did a really good job with it, I encourage you to check it out if you end up liking Ryuutama.
Salvage Union
Now, you can skip this part if you don't want to hear my arguments about why this game isn't just about combat and actually it mechanically supports lots of RP options: Please pardon the extreme amount of spreadsheets I'm about to share here, but what I did was I went through every possible character option available to choose either as your pilot character or for your mech, and tagged everything as either being RP focused, combat focus, utility focus, or a hybrid, and tallied up all the totals for each section. They're all color coded for how they are in the book for easy reference.
Pilot Abilities
Pilot Equipment
Mech Abilities
Mech Systems
Mech Modules
Mech Chassis
Also, none of these even touch on the Carrier Mech options, which are where all your NPCs live and which are almost EXCLUSIVELY about RP options with a small hint of combat or utility - because that's your home base where your guys live, and it's also a soft worldbuilding/tone setting choice because the kind of carrier you build denotes what kind of game you're going to play! AGH. OK I'm done yelling for now.
His Majesty The Worm
Ah yes, blessed be the Wormgame. I am very grateful to have played this game once with its creator and I have to say that it is very much a game that makes more sense once you get it to the table, at least in terms of how the game actually functions. Josh is an extremely prolific blogger and is the current editor for the OSR magazine Knock!, itself a collection of prominent blog posts from over the years. As such, much of this book is poised to teach you a lot of basic principles and how they apply to this game specifically - designing a megadungeon, building a believable town for the players to exist in, codifying interpersonal roleplaying with a set of mechanics to encourage you to get into character, all kinds of cool stuff. It uses tarot cards as its RNG and which tie to your stats, specialties, and also some really interesting combat tricks. It is somewhat of an arcane contraption and may not be for all tables - but if it's right for your table, I think it's a game that really sings. It's done well enough that it pretty regularly sells out, and right now the expansion/megadungeon that Josh has been working on is preordering/slowfunding over on Exalted Funeral.
Also, this is another game I was so moved after reading that I joined a game jam for it just to build a fishing minigame, because every game needs a fishing minigame. It's free online and probably will be forever unless I take time to actually make it a product worth paying for, but I had a lot of fun with it. Speaking of fishing minigames...
Hellwhalers
Hellwhalers, another game I ran at PAXU 2024, is actually a game I felt maybe too Jewish to do justice? Like, to be clear, it didn't actually impact my ability to run the game, nor did it really impact my ability to play the game with PlusOneEXP this year (a Twitch stream which has sadly been lost to the depths), but this is a game of a very particular kind of Christian religious horror that I feel like people raised Catholic will really, really get a kick out of. Or if you're just a hardcore Moby-Dick fan, that's also an option. You are, predictably, in Literal Actual Hell, on board a whaling ship on the hunt for the Hellwhale - a foul demon that your mysterious captain has told you is the only ticket out of Hell. This one's got a lot of juice - as a GM, you can play with or leave behind as many pieces of lore included in the book as you like. The story is primarily driven by the nightly gambling - in a very slick piece of tech, the results of your roll on the sic-bo board will provide you the prompts for the following day's activities, and aside from that it really leans on the characters' playbooks to encourage different kinds of roleplay scenarios. It's a lot of fun if you're a sicko like me who enjoys really, really bleak games, gallows humor, and roleplaying just an absolutely awful person. It also got a zine of extra content this year!
The Wildsea
What if the apocalypse didn't come from war or bombs, but instead an eruption of vegetal life - an uprising of the trees, drinking the oceans dry, burying people beneath new waves of brown and green, and at the tops of these ever growing trees a new world arises - a world in which people ride around giant, chainsaw powered boats trying to make ends meet, tell each other stories, and make sense of this world. That's The Wildsea. It also gets a distinction for being one of the only truly post-human games on this list: like, yes, there are technically human-like people you can play in this game, but they're...not humans like you or I know them. Some were trapped in amber for centuries and have been changed by it. Others, the true descendants of the humans of the old world, have been mutated by the toxic sap that oozes from these giant trees and permanently rerouting the course of their evolution. But much more common are other lifeforms that have been elevated - cactus-folk, fungus-folk, discarded-machinery-folk, thousands-of-spiders-forming-a-single-consciousness-like-that-one-alternate-universe-version-of-Peter-Parker-folk. Rather than classes and hitpoints, your character instead gets built of a number of traits which have their own boxes which when you take damage get marked off, helping more accurately represent how one loses access to the things that make them good at what they do as their failures mount higher and higher in desperate situations. It's a game that is all about the wonders of the world, of hearing reality-warping Whispers on the wind. It is a game of adventuring in a new world, only as concerned with the old world as you want to be. I mean this both in the modern sense and in the antiquated meaning of the word - it is an awesome game.
Mausritter
I probably do not need to sell you on Mausritter. It has an extremely healthy community, maybe even too healthy by some standards - it, like Mothership, has caught on such that the community is regularly holding game jams, doing collective Backerkit funding months, and is all over the place. My friends knew none of that when I showed it to them, of course, nor did they know Into The Odd or any of the other games that ultimately derived from it. (Hold that thought, though.) This being many of my group's first foray into anything from that lineage, I think folks found the character creation mechanics extremely novel and interesting, as well as exactly what kinds of things the rules of the game concern themselves with versus what things are left to the table. You get rules for making your mouse, for the things they carry, for interacting with other animals and for waging very tiny wars. That is, mostly, it. There are of course GM instructions, but while there are rules for making hex maps to set up exploring the world, and there's a mechanical impetus for the mice to make it home to be able to level up (if they survive that long), there's not a whole lot else in there - which has let people play around and make some really cool campaigns for it. There is of course the official boxed set The Estate that has a bunch of adventures in it, and there's Tomb of a Thousand Doors - originally a community-created megadungeon that then got polished, crowdfunded and published by PlusOneEXP. But you don't need any of that to play! There's so much free content out there, and honestly creating a Mausritter adventure is easy enough just by looking around your own house and imagining the mice that are (hopefully not) in your walls and what they might find. And if you're like "Adam if it's so easy why haven't you made anything for Mausritter yet," first of all 1. how dare you, and also 2. I'm in the very early planning process of Krabberitter, so just hold your horses.
The Electrum Archive
Getting this one out of the way right off the bat - I am not linking the adventure I made for this, partly because it's not done/usable and partly because I don't want to have to explain the name of it to polite company. If you know, you know.
Now, more to the point: The Electrum Archive is a game of exploration in a science fantasy world. It is equal parts Moebius and Morrowind. As I have told many people, the fact that the way magic works is that you have to huff ancient alien gasoline that allows you to pierce beyond the veil of death to learn the true names of spirits to evoke them into the world isn't the coolest thing about the lore of this game should be enough to have you running towards that Itch page right now. This game truly has the sauce, as they say. I think it makes exploration-based gameplay much more accessible than some other games (Ryuutama coming to mind immediately, but that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison here). You can get FromSoftesque with it in terms of loredropping and worldbuilding if you like. There are many NPCs and locales with just enough information about them that you feel like you have plenty of usable tools at your disposal without feeling like you and your players need to go study a textbook. The few times I've run this game have all been wild - it supports dungeon delving just as much as it supports sandbox exploration. There's two zines out for it now, and I'm hoping once the creator's most recent Kickstarter for an expanded version of one of their other games finishes fulfillment, we might see a Volume 3.
The Smörkasborg Experiment
One month, I pitched a truly preposterous thing to my bookclub. Because Mörk Borg was so short, and because I had so many variants and so so many more existed, my challenge was for everyone to read the base book and then as many others as they could. Here are some one-sentence reviews of the ones me and my crew physically own:
Mörk Borg: Start here - see where everything else compares, have fun dying, idiot.
Dark Fort: The actual one-page solo game start of the lineage, good to play around with to get the hang of it. (Available along with the MB expansion Feretory.)
Grotten: 1-Bit Deeper: Technically a solo or GM With Player tile placement boardgame that uses MB rules, this one's pretty fun.
Pirate Borg: Is potentially overhyped but honestly still good - I would reflavor all the alternate history stuff unless you and your playgroup are real history sickos about that particular time period like I am.
Blood Borg: Real punk shit that lets you do Vampire: The Masquerade without all those pesky extra rules.
CY_BORG: It is exactly what you think it is, and is the only other MB derivative made by the original crew which means it's the only one with the same level of care.
Kill Your Necromancer: An almost completely standalone adventure book where you're all undead who have to kill the person who has cursed you with life once again - have fun killing, idiot.
Honestly, knowing Mörk Borg is very handy for deciphering so many other games these days, if you don't have at least the baseline one I'd recommend it. There's all kinds of people doing really inventive stuff with it because of how simple and straightforward the rules are, and the people who really put in the time and care rather than just jocking Johan Nohr's style have some really cool spins on the concept - I personally recommend anything Adam Vass (of Blood Borg, above) or Paweł Kicman (of Kill Your Necromancer, above) do if you want a good place to start once you've tried the OG.
(Yes I was born in 1990, what about the slang that is stuck in my vocabulary tipped you off?)
A Tour of Bastionland
Another month, I convinced the crew to read Into The Odd, Electric Bastionland, and Mythic Bastionland - not just because ITO is foundational to many other games as mentioned previously and both Bastionland games build on that, but also because of the evolution both of the narrative of the world and of Chris McDowall as a writer. Like I personally was interested in mapping the plot arc of the universe that Bastion lives within, but without overselling it I really think of these games as paradigm setting for each era they dropped in. These games are the gravity wells that distort the space-time of this particular side of the gaming world, and I think that taking the time to understand them as well as things Chris puts on his blog, or the interviews he does for his podcast online, really end up unlocking a lot of ways to think about games.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that they're all pretty fun to play.
Slugblaster
One other thing about Slugblaster - much like Triangle Agency rewrote my brain about how I interact with any game world, Slugblaster rewrote my brain with the intent behind its action roll - you may have heard to "only roll when failure is interesting," but Slugblaster takes it a step further to say "only roll for WHAT is interesting." If you're being jumped by a biker gang, if each and every punch against each and every biker isn't the interesting part, don't roll for that. Roll to see how well you resolve the situation - a 6 on your d6 might mean you beat the shit out of an entire gang, or it might mean you successfully escaped with your teeth intact. Likewise, and I think I'm roughly quoting this directly from the Episode Zero of the My First Dungeon AP, if you're tied to a chair and need to grab a laserknife to cut yourself out, maybe it's interesting to see each and every inch that you skooch your hand across the floor towards that laser knife. Roll for what is interesting.
OUTRO
So that's it! That's every game I forced my friends to read with me over the last 12 months.
Except that's not every game I read over the last 12 months, is it? Take, for example, my haul from PAXU:
I ran CBR+PNK at PAXU as well on behalf of Mythworks in their big 50+ person megagame, which was absolutely wild. I'm reading Stillfleet now in preparation for playing it on Sunday in the Stillfleet Discord. I read the original preview edition of The Between and played in a medium-length game of it while the hypetrain was rolling for the crowdfunding campaign. While my job ultimately ended up screwing me out of the time off to go work for Possum Creek this summer at GenCon, I'd read and prepared to run Wanderhome. I've been writing an adventure for PlusOneEXP for Down We Go for...frankly too long now actually (sorry Tony) but I've been deep in those mines. I ran The Wassailing of Claus Manor at PAXU 2024 as well, and ended up writing something for the upcoming second expansion for it called The Pine Tar of Claus Manor which is...coming out sometime soon? I used the original edition of A Land Once Magic (updated version pictured above in the hand-stamped bag) to help worldbuild for a game of Armour Astir (which I talked about in a previous blogpost). I played Mappa Mundi, Trophy Dark and Inevitable for charity streams this year. I've played an absolute shit load of Mothership and Cloud Empress this year, both of which have had a ton of adventures to flip through and use (CE's books are still pre-shipping from the crowdfunder, but watt sent us the PDFs ages ago and lemme tell you, they're worth it). I finally read the Old School Essentials rules so I could play in a stream over on PlusOneEXP to promote Duginthroat Divided. While I haven't actually sat down to read the Cairn 2e rules I got recently, I did get to play one of Joseph R Lewis' adventures with him at a con in Baltimore with a veritable who's who of the Cairn extended family. And that's before getting into all the zines I got either from PlusOneEXP's Zine Club or from the various zine month crowdfunders! It's been a huge year for games, both personally and broadly! I encourage you to get out there and go buy some of these games - every single thing I've talked about in this post is a game I feel has value either as reference material or as an actual game to be played, and I'm very glad that both my friends that I pressganged into a bookclub and the people out there in the world who've welcomed me into their gaming groups and streaming games have all been willing to play with me this year. Excited to see what 2026 holds.
Stay weird out there.
