Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood
A boss battler with genuinely great writing attached, at the cost of an evening every time you want to touch it.
I'm Travis Monroe. 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 →
Board games
Sleeping Gods
An atlas you sail across instead of a map you walk across, and a story that turns out to funnel you toward the same handful of endings no matter what you pick.
The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth
A streamlined reskin of 7 Wonders Duel that trims exactly the parts I never liked and keeps me from wanting to relaunch a game the moment one ends.
Inis
A celtic area control game where nobody wins by killing everyone, they win by being agreed with. That took me a full game to actually believe.
Cloudspire
A puzzle with no clean solution and a rulebook that wants you to earn every bit of it before it stops feeling hard to learn.
Mage Knight Board Game
Four to five hours to finish a scenario, and I still think about the deck I built two years ago the way other people think about a good trip.
The Old King's Crown
A small bluffing card game that earned every bit of the crown I got to wear at a convention table for one very smug evening.
Twilight Imperium (Fourth Edition)
Ten hours of galactic empire building, and about six of them are watching other people take their turn.
Earthborne Rangers
A campaign card game with no basic attack action, which sounds like a gimmick until you've spent an afternoon trying to coexist with a valley instead of clearing it.
Unmatched
Tactical combat with the rules explained in five minutes, which is exactly the problem once you've played the same fighter four times.
Books
Manufacturing Consent
A dense, thoroughly sourced argument about how media narrows what counts as sayable, and a book I had to read in chunks rather than sittings.
The Fifth Season
Second person shouldn't work for an entire novel, and then Jemisin makes it the reason the book hits as hard as it does.
The Stars Are Legion
A galaxy of living, decaying, birthing worldships, and I spent half the book not sure if I was disgusted or amazed. I landed on both.
2312
The terraforming detail is genuinely thrilling if you're the kind of reader who wants it, and I found out partway through that I'm only sometimes that reader.
The Player of Games
The best novel I've read about a game that doesn't exist, and I say that as someone who reviews actual games for a living, more or less.
The Secret of Our Success
A book about why humans aren't actually that smart individually, and why that's the whole point.
The Grace of Kings
A fantasy epic that reads more like a history book than a novel, in the best way for about two thirds of it.
The Master and Margarita
The best book I've read where I'm still not entirely sure I understood the thing I loved.
Chaos: Making a New Science
A history of the people who found chaos theory, more than an explanation of what it actually is, and I finished still not sure I could explain it back.
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
A real, defensible argument buried inside more repetition than it needed, and a fight with the field it's picking on the whole way through.
Essays
The Week I Downgraded Sleeping Gods
I gave this one a glowing first impression after one campaign. Two more campaigns in, I quietly walked it back, and I want to be honest about why.
The Hotel Lobby Rule
If there's a table and a stranger with an hour to kill, I've decided that's basically an invitation. Not everyone agrees.
What Tulsa Looks Like in November, From a Truck Window
I know my hometown mostly from a driver's seat these days, coming and going, never quite arriving in the middle of a Tuesday.
Teaching Reyes a Card Game in a Denver Layover
Five hours, a grounded connection, and a deck of cards neither of us had opened before. That's the whole origin story, more or less.
Three Weeks Out, One Week Back
My apartment isn't lived in so much as it's visited, once a month, by someone who used to live there full time.
The Line in Garden City That Never Runs on Schedule
I've spent more hours waiting for a plant to be ready for me than actually working on it, and I've finally made peace with that being most of the job.
The Travel Case I Keep Repacking
One case, packed for the road, unpacked at home, packed again. I've started timing how long it stays empty.
The Repair I Signed Off On Too Fast
A cold storage compressor in Wichita, a reading that looked fine, and a callback three days later that taught me something about how I rate games too.
Why I Still Carry Paperbacks Instead of a Tablet
I own a tablet. It lives in a drawer. There's one specific hotel night that explains why.
Why I Won't Rate a Game I Haven't Finished
I've got three games on a shelf right now with strong opinions attached and zero completed plays. None of them are getting a number from me.