Driving Back to Coeur d'Alene for My Brother's Recommendation
Forty minutes each way, twice a month or so, to sit in the same kitchen we grew up eating in and argue about a book he made me read.
I'm Ian Whitaker. I write up board games and books here once I've actually finished with them, plus the occasional personal post that has nothing to do with either. Nothing on this site is a review copy. More about me →
Recent posts
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Comic book cooperative card combat that's better with a group that resists the urge to backseat everyone else's turn.
The Sparrow
A first-contact novel that broke me more thoroughly than anything I've read in years, and I don't even read that much science fiction.
Magic: The Gathering
Thirty years of the best game design ideas in the hobby, buried under a collection habit I can no longer justify.
Unmatched
The two-player game I reach for most, and the one that finally cured my group of the 'I already know what you're going to do' problem.
Mistborn
A heist novel wearing a magic system's clothes, and the magic system is good enough that I didn't mind the disguise.
Tolerance Stacking and the Wednesday Rules Dispute
Twenty minutes arguing about a card's wording, and the warehouse math that finally settled it.
This War of Mine: The Board Game
The only game that's ever made our whole table go quiet, and mean it as a compliment.
The Night Marcus Almost Walked Out of His Own Storytelling Chair
Running Blood on the Clocktower is a bigger job than most of us at the table give him credit for, and one night it showed.
Marvel Champions: The Card Game
A living card game that finally made deckbuilding click for me, once I stopped trying to solve every villain the same way.
The Trial
A bureaucratic nightmare that got funnier and more infuriating the longer I sat with it.
The Pallet Count I Bring Home With Me
Eight years of counting pallets for a living does something to how you play a points-scoring game, and I only noticed it once Dana pointed it out.
Star Maker
The book half the science fiction I already love is quietly stealing from, and I can see why now, even where it lost me.
Mage Knight Board Game
A genuinely huge solo campaign, and the first thing that made me reconsider how I feel about playing games alone.
Why I Won't Buy a Companion App Game Anymore
A rule I made for myself two years ago, and the specific bad night that made me make it.
The Notebook I Keep Instead of Trusting My Memory
Marcus calls it a spreadsheet with extra steps. He's not wrong, but he also doesn't understand why I need it.
The Master and His Emissary
A genuinely brilliant argument buried inside more pages than it strictly needed.
Blood on the Clocktower
The social deduction game that made me stop calling social deduction games a genre I merely tolerate.
Secondhand Time
An oral history of the end of the Soviet Union that I've thought about nearly every week since finishing it.
Thunder Road: Vendetta
Loud, dumb fun for one night, and I mean both of those as compliments, mostly.
SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
A heavy, handsome science game that rewards planning further ahead than my group usually manages.
Teaching Dana Sky Team on a Tuesday That Went Sideways
The first time we played it, we crashed the plane in the tutorial scenario. She still brings that up.
Never Let Me Go
A quiet, devastating book that reveals its premise slowly enough that I don't want to spoil it for anyone.
Sky Team
Twenty minutes, two players, dice, and somehow the tensest thing I own. Dana likes this one, which tells you everything.
The Overstory
Nine lives braided around trees, some threads stronger than others, and one accidental pairing that made the whole book click for me.
We
The dystopia that beat 1984 to nearly everything it's famous for, and honestly does some of it sharper.
What a Spokane Winter Does to the Loading Dock
Snow is fun. Shoveling a dock apron at six in the morning before the first truck is not, and neither is a game night when nobody wants to leave the house.
The Magic Collection I Finally Admitted I'd Outgrown
I told myself for three years I'd sort the bin eventually. I finally sorted it, and it didn't go the way I expected.
Why I Read on Lunch Breaks Instead of at Home
Thirty-five minutes in a break room with bad lighting turns out to be better reading time than a whole evening at home.
1984
A reread I put off for years, and one that hit differently now than it did assigned in a tenth-grade classroom.