Austin Charlie – Board Game Quest

Wraith and the Giants Review

Austin Charlie — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 13:06:00 +0000

Things are bad. Monstrous colossi stride the earth, leaving naught but death and destruction in their wake. In the face of these awe-inspiring behemoths, only you have the skills and training required to take them on—if you fail, your people are surely doomed… No, I’m not talking about that game. No, not that one either. […]

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Unstoppable Review

Austin Charlie — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:23:58 +0000

I think it’s fair to describe John D. Clair as king of the card-crafting deckbuilder. Admittedly, no one else is vying for that throne, but it’s hard to deny the man’s prolificacy in the arena of “putting cards in sleeves with order cards to create different cards.” From the light, whimsical forests of Mystic Vale […]

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The Last of Us: Escape the Dark Review

Austin Charlie — Tue, 06 May 2025 13:02:46 +0000

I never know how harsh to be with an adaptation of an existing intellectual property. It’s an easy enough decision when the underlying game is bad, but when it’s good or even great, how much does its devotion to the theme matter? If Uwe Rosenburg releases his next great worker placement game set in the […]

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Top 10 Traditional Card Games

Austin Charlie — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 13:02:59 +0000

Traditional card games (played with some subset of a standard 52-card deck) have become something of an archaic art form, but they have an endearing messiness that you can’t find in modern board games. These are games that weren’t designed for a target audience, or produced with an eye on profit margins and visual appeal—they […]

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Forest Shuffle: Woodland Edge Review

Austin Charlie — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:07:42 +0000

Forest Shuffle fits into a wide category of games I own, where the following statement somehow makes perfect sense to me: “This game doesn’t need an expansion, but I desperately want one.” Why? Is this some deep-seated part of the human psyche? Have I been so thoroughly conditioned as a consumer to always crave new […]

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Rome: Fate of an Empire Review

Austin Charlie — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 13:07:52 +0000

Sandbox-y Euro games are everywhere these days, and though I want to love them all, I find myself cold on most of them. I like my sandbox to be deep without many rules, sprawling without many components, and difficult without feeling constrained. Oh, and I need it to be almost entirely card-based. How hard can […]

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Forest Shuffle Review

Austin Charlie — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:00:56 +0000

I’m a big fan of what I like to call “deck-searching” games. Players draw from a shared deck, filled with scoring opportunities and special abilities, and try to build as efficient a tableau as possible—your Arks Nova, your Races for the Galaxies, and so on. That said, the more of these games I play, the […]

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Sky Team Review

Austin Charlie — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 14:06:33 +0000

I remember wanting to be a pilot when I was a kid. It’s a pretty popular childhood dream—the image of flying through the air is inherently thrilling, plus you get as many of those little metal wings as you want. Imagine my dismay, then, when a friend of mine (who was training to be a […]

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Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands Review

Austin Charlie — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:05:34 +0000

Far Cry 3 was one of my favorite video games ever when I was younger, and it still holds a special place in my heart. It’s the kind of distraction-filled open world game that feels impossible to translate to a tabletop game—not just because of its action gameplay, but also its jumble of interlocking systems, […]

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Snowfall Over Mountains Review

Austin Charlie — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 13:56:49 +0000

As I write this review, we’re headed into the first days of winter, but the temperature outside is hot and sweltering as an early summer afternoon. It’s a shame because I love to relax on a bitingly cold day. The air is crisp enough to feel the chill, but the soporific heat from a blanket […]

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