This is not the first time I review Stars without Number, the old-school SciFi sandboxing RPG by Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine Publishing), but with my growing experience in role-play gaming I feel I missed some real important things the last two times. So, again, let's have a look at what makes SWN special.

We'll skip the boring parts, like the character creations (it's D&D. Take 3d6 and roll them. Got it?), combat rules (Take a d20 and I'll tell you if you hit!), gear (pistol goes bang, laser ...

There's been a bit of discussion about VASSAL in the ASL community, started by this blog post (warning: auto-play music). The central hypothesis of this is that ASL is a social game (to which I agree) and that VASSAL gets in the way of that (to which I disagree very strongly).

I am a digital native. I have been on the internet for about ten years now, I used Twitter before it was cool and IRC greatly helped ...

Today, I got a phishing e-mail.

I hope you have never been subject to such a shocking event for yourself, and apologize if the horror of my tale gave you a heart attack.

Well, this one looked a bit more legit than most of them, and it was certainly audacious: A mail claiming to be from Yahoo and sent by a Yahoo user. It somehow passed my spam filter, so I decided I might as well tell Yahoo about it, so they might unleash their mighty rage upon the morally bankrupt offender. For sure, there wo...

Just as a heads-up for those of you who do not keep an eye on the Humble Bundle page all the time: The new offer (valid for two weeks from now) is really worth its money.

You can get the whole BioShock series, SpecOps: The Line, XCom Enemy Unknown and XCom Declassified, Mafia II and The Darkness II if you pay 20$ or more, and if you pay more than the average customer (which would mean about 6$ right now), you get everything minus XCom: EU and BioSho...

It doesn't shy away from asking important questions . It is highly educational.

It has well-written dialogs.

[![2014-07-06 21.34.52](/wp-co...

During a recent stay at the hospital, I had the opportunity to experiment a bit with watercolour. Never really having painted before, it turned out to be much fun and also yielded some results that I can show without being ashamed. They are already buried in the deep, dark tunnels of DeviantART, but now I have my own personal blog, I believe they deserve to be on it. :)

This here was my first attempt to paint...

Violence – is there anything it can’t fix? Well, history would teach us that there is indeed, but nobody likes history and it never gets invited to any LAN parties.

Broforce (subtitled “Freedom Simulator”) is a very ironic indie side scroller about solving problems the only way worth the effort: by making lots of stuff explode. The gameplay is highly focused on co-op, so the only component I really tried out was the campaign because everyth...

This is.

My regular opponent and me sat down to play S13 Priority Target, and then we played it again with reversed sides. I lost twice, which confirms the ASL Scenario Archive’s claim of perfect balance. My opponent wrote AARs for both [games](http://boardgamegeek.com/threa...

I just finished playing S28 Out of Luck, which you can get for free at MMP’s wobsite. I lost so badly that not even blaming it on the dice makes it any better. Was it the scenario’s fault? Probably not.

As most of the times, I completely screwed up my setup, leaving a large blind spot on the hard-to-defend hills in the northwest corner and concentrating on the open ground in the northeast and th...

So my regular Starter Kit opponent and me sat down to play our first match of 2014, “Converging Assaults” (Starter Kit Expansion Pack #1, S48), which was probably the weirdest match I’ve ever played.

What’s it about? US troops advance into a city in Sicily from the West and meet Italian troops advancing from the West. A firefight ensues. For added fun, some Italian tanks are added into the mix and fall into the back of the US infantry.

And I use the words “fun” and “tanks” quite wrongly. We a...