Listened to Good Inside recently, which featured Jonathan Haidt and his book The Anxious Generation, where I found sweeping claims, golden age nostalgia, and rigid gender tropes, which undermine the nuance needed in today’s complex digital landscape. Blaming smartphones as the sole cause of rising mental health issues ignores broader systemic pressures...

Welcome to Picking at Nits, where I nitpick perfectly fine games. Today’s target: Command of Nature. I love Unstable Games. The art, the charm, the fast play, but this is not a deckbuilder. The 1-2-3 formation mechanic is clever, the art is stellar, and the game flows quickly. But let’s not mislabel it. It’s a tactical army management card game, not a deckbuilder as what it's marketed as...

It's 1:53 am, and I'm scouring Reddit and DriveThruRPG for a kids' RPG that surely must exist... right? I've long dreamed of gathering my boys around the table with D&D books and minis, but nothing out there fits. So, I’m designing my own: a language-independent TTRPG for 4-year-olds. This is the start of Little Adventurers, a game built for tiny hands and big imaginations...

Welcome to Picking at Nits, where I nitpick tiny details of otherwise playable games. Today’s game: The Quest Kids! On a crusade of playing games that my son's too young for, I decided to jump into The Quest Kids with Tobias. He's 4 now and starting to read simple words, so with low-text and high iconography, it seemed like an easy enough jump. But we ran into some production issues...