Weekend weather forecast for the Demon Wastes: Look for scattered sword-showers late morning through midafternoon Saturday, which should clear up just in time for the Parade of the Stricken.

Games of the Week

• Metal Queens ov Skull Mountain (2:58)
Our curated indie RPG series with Walt continues: He’s burrowed way back in the vaults to show us Metal Queens ov Skull Mountain. It’s a story-driven thrash metal holodeck whose light structure paves the way for incredible setpiece battles that rock as hard as you and your GM can make them.

• Professor Phelyx’s Tarot (24:43)
I talk to Denver scholar, magician, and man-about-town Professor Phelyx. I found out he’s 500 hours into the creation of his own tarot deck. Meet Phelyx and get a cool history lesson about tarot’s roots as a storytelling game.

• Dwelling Solo Journaling RPG (45:46)
My work continues in the pages of Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts. We’re at the midpoint of the book, where the narrator endures a queasy vision in the unnatural red light cast by the basement.

Track of the Week

(52:22)
I’m gonna zoom in on Keith Murray’s amazing lead-off of the “I Shot Ya” track, helmed by LL Cool J and also featuring Prodigy, Fat Joe, and Foxy Brown. Also, Kwest will show us how to bring a posse cut home.

Visit the Doghouse
This is all brought to you by our episode sponsor, Doghouse Reilly, purveyor of clever T-shirts based on visual puns and opening lyrics from classic hip hop tracks. This includes a T-shirt that Doghouse did just for us: A snippet of a Gang Starr lyric with some clever typesetting, available in three colors.

Please welcome episode sponsor Doghouse Reilly — the Teemill storefront of my man Tim Sismey, who was our guest curator for last segment’s Track of the Week.

Tim makes clever tees based on visual puns and opening lyrics from classic hip hop songs. He also made a special shirt for Breakup Gaming Society featuring one of my favorite lines from a Guru verse.

Games of the Week

• Final Girl: A Knock at the Door (3:37)
I dove face first into Final Girl: A Knock at the Door, only my second experience with this thrilling, slick and cruel hit solo horror franchise. It threw me with some new tricks. And the Final Girl, Ava, hit back with some new tactics of her own. Ride along for that story about the once-peaceful lakeside vacation spot of Wingard Cottage.

• Scrabble (16:42)
Last fall I played a much gentler contest in a much safer location: A house in Taos, where I tilted at Scrabble with The Moms for the first time in years. In Final Girl, you fight the killer. In Scrabble, you fight The Moms, but we were also teaming up against the thieves of our memory and language.

• Fantasy Flight Games Retrospective (22:16)
Another chunk of my talk with Shelf Stable co-host Kenny Katayama. Discussed: Battlestar Galactica, Letters from Whitechapel, Fury of Dracula and more…

Track of the Week

(31:47)
More cross-Atlantic, cross-genre sample and production tracing as evidenced in classic hip hop songs. In this case, a look at “Dance for Me” off Queen Latifah’s very first album in 1989 — and the Ultimatum remix that still thrills me more than 35 years after first hearing it.

You can always hit the show with a one-time donation to get a really dumb cocktail book and a really disarming frog sticker.

My nervous system: the final frontier. These are the voyages of my moth-eaten brain. Its five-round mission: to play a fucking game correctly.

Games of the Week (2:51)
• SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 2024’s big hit about managing a space agency that’s looking for hard evidence of somebody out there. I tried this weighty Euro-style game over the winter in solo mode for the first time. I messed it up so badly, you could say I hadn’t played it at all. I revisited this busy resource management adventure twice and got a clearer view. Notes on that.

• The Fantasy Flight Games golden age retrospective series continues. I interviewed Shelf Stable podcast co-host Kenny Katayama about his perspective on this unbelievable string of seminal titles — in particular, his experience with several of the flagship Living Card Games they issued late in their glory run: Android: Netrunner, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, Legend of the Five Rings, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and more…

Track of the Week (42:18)
It’s “Cordless Mics at 20 Paces” by DJ Skitz featuring Phi-Life Cypher, which was recommended to me by my UK pal, Tim Sismey. This track is tight and these dudes rapped their asses off; Tim tells us how it fit into his life and his story of early 2000s UK hip hop.

You can always hit the show with a one-time donation to get a really dumb cocktail book and a really disarming frog sticker.