Mercer's Corner

Book Aug 17, 2026

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.

Board Game Aug 15, 2026

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.

Book Aug 13, 2026

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.

Board Game Aug 11, 2026

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.

Book Aug 6, 2026

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.

Board Game Aug 2, 2026

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.

Book Jul 30, 2026

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.

Board Game Jul 26, 2026

Frosthaven

★★★★☆

Gloomhaven's mechanics sharpened and its upkeep bloated, plus a town-building layer I didn't ask for but mostly enjoy anyway.

Book Jul 23, 2026

Diaspora

★★★★☆

Egan asks you to sit through thirty pages of orphanogenesis exposition before the story even starts moving, and somehow it's worth it.

Personal Jul 18, 2026

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.

Board Game Jul 16, 2026

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.

Book Jul 15, 2026

Candide

★★★☆☆

A short, brutal satire that made its point early and then kept making it, and kept making it, for another hundred pages.

Personal Jul 14, 2026

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.

Board Game Jul 10, 2026

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.

Personal Jul 7, 2026

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.

Book Jul 6, 2026

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.

Personal Jul 5, 2026

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.

Board Game Jul 2, 2026

Inis

★★★☆☆

Beautiful card art, a genuinely clever drafting system, and an endgame that's dragged us into a fifth round more than once.

Personal Jun 29, 2026

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.

Book Jun 22, 2026

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.

Personal Jun 20, 2026

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.

Board Game Jun 16, 2026

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.

Personal Jun 11, 2026

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.

Book Jun 8, 2026

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.

Personal Jun 2, 2026

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.

Board Game May 30, 2026

Too Many Bones

★★★★☆

A dice-building dungeon crawler with an absurd barrier to entry and a genuinely clever system once you're past it.

Personal May 28, 2026

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.

Book May 24, 2026

Rereading 1984 in My Thirties

★★★★☆

The book I loved uncritically at seventeen reads differently now, denser, more exhausting, and honestly better for it.

Personal May 23, 2026

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.

Board Game May 20, 2026

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.