Troy Press

With the release yesterday by Office Dog of The Two Towers: The Trick-Taking Game, the sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game, I reached out to interview their design, Bryan Bornmueller.

The boyfriend of one of my best friends calls me “The Logger.” Not “The Blogger”: “The Logger.”He knows I log my beers, log my boardgames, log my books, log my rides, log my weight. (He should see our work logs, where I’ve kept timesheets since 2012 so I can conduct time-usage analysis on myself.) Why do I log so many things?

Our most popular posts are now Star Trek watchlists and other top-10–style lists. These pushed out the PbtA and card-game articles that dominated in 2024.

If you’re thinking of cutting back alcohol yourself in 2026, consider these non-alcoholic beers. Here are the average ratings for each type’s top 10: Sour (3.83 rating), Porter & Stout (3.65), Lager (3.64), Pale Ale (3.49). Turns out the diehards who rate beers rate non-alcoholic sours the highest by quite a bit. The top 10 non-alcoholic beers, regardless of type, are identical to the top 10 sours.

With just 10 Star Trek episodes and a movie, the year 2025 saw a dramatic drop from 2024, when 40 episodes premiered across Discovery season 5, Prodigy season 2, and Lower Decks season 5. This year had the lowest number of new Star Trek episodes since 2018, when only the 6 episodes of Discovery season 1 chapter 2 premiered.

As part of the recent trick-taking renaissance, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game improves upon the mechanics of The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine with more thematic missions (chapters) and tasks (characters).

Voyage of the Marigold, by Andrew Stephens, is an interesting twist on classic Trek games. Like the first Trek, in Voyage of the Marigold you’re exploring a grid, but—in contrast—you’re encountering strange new worlds and anomalies as you explore, and you responding to choice prompts rather than using a command menu.

Near the end of my watch-through of the top 100 episodes of Star Trek, I got to the Star Trek: Prodigy series. I decided to expand from the eight episodes that made the top 100 and watch the top 10ish Prodigy episodes.

Prepping a planet for a session requires embracing some tropes and being generous with your hooks. I grew up on location-based prep. “Here’s a dungeon or a hexmap. It tells you where and what everything is.” In contrast, you can’t prep a planet at that level of detail, unless maybe it’s one of the planetoids visited by The Little Prince! Fortunately, the tropes common to space opera simplify what players expect.

In my study of Tiny BASICs, one I overlooked reviewing was Sinclair 4K BASIC, which stands out for its unique keyboard, its approach to graphics, and its memory usage.

Lexember is a social-media challenge to add at least one word to your constructed language (conlang) each day of December. This year I’ve created three sets of prompts, depending on how ambitious you are.

While most fantasy TTRPGs embrace pantheons of gods, few include demigods, the offspring of the union of a god and human. Yet demigods present the opportunity to bring the life of the gods down to earth and to connect PCs with the gods in a unique way.

If your Powered by the Apocalypse game has stats, you want the basic moves to make a balanced use of those stats. That’s not always as simple as having five basic moves for your five basic stats, for instance, because moves may get used in play at different frequencies.