Phil Ulrich

It's no secret that sometimes when trying to convince people to give a tabletop RPG other than Dungeons & Dragons a try, one of the protests that often crops up is, "it's too hard to learn new games!" To those of us already acquainted with other games, this seems ridiculous, but it's worth examining: after all, if you've only learned the rules to one game, and that game is wildly complex from the get-go, what evidence do you have that every game isn't like that?

Flasks are back, baby!

At GenCon 2024, three of tabletop gaming's most prestigious awards -- the ENNIES -- were swept not by a certain toy conglomerate who wants $180 for a half-edition revision bump, but by a tabletop game that escaped many gamers' notice until its win: Shadowdark.

It will probably not surprise World of Warcraft players to learn that The War Within once again has a new entry in the series of Catalysts -- the machines left behind by cosmic forces that allow us to convert appropriate gear into tier sets, making it much easier to obtain sets (whether for actual power gains during the season they're relevant, or for transmog after the fact).

Congratulations on making it to another Friday, Watchers!

With the Warbound gear finally starting to flow in World of Warcraft thanks to major buffs to the Radiant Echoes event, the next thing on many players' minds will be upgrading that gear.

After news broke this morning about the formation of a new agile team within Microsoft to produce AA-quality games using Blizzard's existing properties, naturally discussion immediately went to spitballing ideas of what exactly those games would be.

While there was a lot of discussion of what effect the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard merger might have on the games industry in the long term, there hadn't been a lot of visible effect outside of perhaps some effect on Diablo 4's launch.

Every expansion in World of Warcraft brings with it tasty new Cooking recipes, from recipes so good they became actual real-life recipes to the nearly-inedible foods of Shadowlands (I guess Brokers didn't know that most of us don't like Pickled Meat Smoothies and Butterscotch Marinated Ribs). The War Within also includes a large variety of new foods (including food that lasts through death!), many of which have a fun twist on the fact that you're spending a lot of time in cave systems.

The end of WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is extremely nigh: August 19th is just around the corner, after all.