Aug 17, 2026 Book
The Reality Dysfunction
★★★★☆
Three thousand pages of space opera and horror ahead of me across this series, and after book one I'm already resigned to reading all of it.
Mercer's Corner
My personal blog about the board games I play and the books I read — honest, first-person reviews, no scores handed down from on high, just what worked and what didn't.
Aug 15, 2026 Board Game
The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition
★★★★☆
A deluxe remake of a game I already owned in its plainer form, and I still think the upgrade was worth it, mostly because of the tiles.
Aug 13, 2026 Book
Phi
★★★☆☆
Galileo touring the brain in conversation with Descartes and Emily Dickinson, which is either a beautiful idea for a science book or a very expensive way to avoid writing one.
Aug 11, 2026 Board Game
The Old King's Crown
★★★☆☆
Gorgeous lane battler that resolves its battles with one blind card play per region, and I'm still deciding if that's elegant or just thin.
Aug 6, 2026 Book
The Social Conquest of Earth
★★★★☆
E.O. Wilson picks a fight with his own field's consensus on kin selection, and I don't have the biology background to referee it, but I loved reading the argument anyway.
Aug 2, 2026 Board Game
Godtear
★★★☆☆
A skirmish game with a genuinely clean ruleset that I keep wanting to like more than I actually do once the dice get involved.
Jul 30, 2026 Book
The Glass Bead Game
★★★★☆
Hesse never actually tells you the rules of the game the whole book is named after, and I spent four hundred pages waiting for him to.
Jul 26, 2026 Board Game
Frosthaven
★★★★☆
Gloomhaven's mechanics sharpened and its upkeep bloated, plus a town-building layer I didn't ask for but mostly enjoy anyway.
Jul 23, 2026 Book
Diaspora
★★★★☆
Egan asks you to sit through thirty pages of orphanogenesis exposition before the story even starts moving, and somehow it's worth it.
Jul 18, 2026 Personal
The Game I Sold Everyone On That Nobody Else Loved
I evangelized this one hard for a month. Three sessions later I was the only person still asking to play it, and I had to actually sit with why.
Jul 16, 2026 Board Game
SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
★★★★☆
A spinning central board and a genuinely fresh engine, wrapped in enough mental overhead that I won't be bringing it every week.
Jul 15, 2026 Book
Candide
★★★☆☆
A short, brutal satire that made its point early and then kept making it, and kept making it, for another hundred pages.
Jul 14, 2026 Personal
The Scenario That Nearly Ended the Tuesday Group
One bad campaign scenario, a three-hour loss, and a genuinely tense car ride home. Here's how close six years of Tuesdays came to just stopping.
Jul 10, 2026 Board Game
Mechs vs. Minions
★★★★☆
The best box insert I own, bar none, wrapped around a co-op programming game that's fun for about as long as the campaign lasts.
Jul 7, 2026 Personal
Physical Books, and Why I Won't Switch
Everyone in my life reads on a tablet now. I've tried it twice, and both times ended up back at the shelf for a reason I didn't expect.
Jul 6, 2026 Book
Small Gods
★★★★★
My first Discworld book, and probably not the one people usually recommend to start with, but I'm glad it's the one I picked up.
Jul 5, 2026 Personal
Teaching Priya a Game I Loved, and Watching Her Pick It Apart
I brought a game to the table convinced it was airtight. Twenty minutes in, Priya found the seam I'd never noticed, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Jul 2, 2026 Board Game
Inis
★★★☆☆
Beautiful card art, a genuinely clever drafting system, and an endgame that's dragged us into a fifth round more than once.
Jun 29, 2026 Personal
A Week Arguing With a Vendor About a Tolerance Spec, and What It Taught Me About Rules Disputes
A supplier dispute at work turned out to be the same argument my game group has every time a rulebook is ambiguous, just with more money on the line.
Jun 22, 2026 Book
The Cyberiad
★★★★★
Two robot inventors, a universe of pseudoscientific wordplay, and one of the funniest books I've read that's also quietly about the limits of reason.
Jun 20, 2026 Personal
The Case Against Playing Games Alone
Solo modes are everywhere now and I own several. I still think the thing I actually want out of a game night can't happen without another person in the room.
Jun 16, 2026 Board Game
Brass: Birmingham
★★★★★
The heaviest euro on my shelf and still the one I most want to teach to someone new, which is its own kind of achievement.
Jun 11, 2026 Personal
Why I Moved to the High Desert, and What I Didn't Expect to Miss
Bend for the job, the dry air, the mountains thirty minutes away. Also, somehow, the thing I miss most is rain on a specific kind of roof.
Jun 8, 2026 Book
Weapons of Math Destruction
★★★★★
A book about algorithms written for people who don't build them, and it still managed to change how I think about the ones I use every day.
Jun 2, 2026 Personal
The Insert I Rebuilt Twice
An engineer's take on why a bad box insert bothers me more than it should, and the second attempt at Brass: Birmingham's that finally got it right.
May 30, 2026 Board Game
Too Many Bones
★★★★☆
A dice-building dungeon crawler with an absurd barrier to entry and a genuinely clever system once you're past it.
May 28, 2026 Personal
What's Actually in My Reading Log
A plain notebook by the bed, no app, no star ratings until later. Here's what six years of stubbornly analog reading tracking actually looks like.
May 24, 2026 Book
Rereading 1984 in My Thirties
★★★★☆
The book I loved uncritically at seventeen reads differently now, denser, more exhausting, and honestly better for it.
May 23, 2026 Personal
Dave's Copy of Ticket to Ride
The origin story, six years back, of how one coworker's lunch-break board game turned into a Tuesday habit I never really quit.
May 20, 2026 Board Game
Cascadia
★★★★☆
A tile-and-token puzzle that's fast to teach and genuinely relaxing, even if two of my regulars think it's just Calico's quieter cousin.