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.

Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen can frolic in my pickle water. The world they’re imagining sucks.

We’re going to hide from it in the best way possible: An RPG actual play session where two ninjas have to kill Cheap Trick during their famous Budokan set in 1978. Ingest this into your model.

News
• If you live in Chicagoland and like supporting indie game designers, the Indie Boardgame Showcase is stopping at Big Star in Wrigleyville on Sunday, March 8 from 4:30-8:00 p.m. More than 15 designers will be there, demoing what they made for you. Get 50% off your ticket with the code BREAKUP at Quirk Events’ website.

• Also, I’m giving away a charming stack of indie games from The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games and Ada Press. Hear about these games and learn how to win them in the Games of the Week segment of Episode 110.

Game of the Week (3:43)
• You want a taste at how a Mars colony would have played out? Go to Texas, where your fixed-income auntie will be braised inside her apartment during unprecedented free-market desert heat as crypto mining operations brown out her AC and people in Granbury get crippling headaches from the hum of exotic currency being made across the street. I do not envy science fiction writers right now. This and other thoughts on AI in context of the fun slaughterhouse economy they’ve been iterating through several thrilling market crashes for decades now.

• Where can we go that these hyperreal Carnegies and Rockefellers can’t ruin? Well, we can teleport to Japan in 1978 and kill one of my favorite bands. Hear the mission and character setup for some actual play of the NINJA BORG RPG by Walton Wood and Rugose Kohn.

Track of the Week (34:42)
Pardon the sound quality, but I found some deep old ‘93-’94 big-crew boom bap cuts on YouTube from Now Born Click, Troubleneck Brothers and Freakin Inglish. You need to hear selections from these

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

How the hell do you make a product called Tony’s Chocolonely and not do a special Valentine’s Day bar with a fentanyl center and a little space on the wrapper to write a suicide haiku.

Games of the Week (3:14)

• I’m giving away creations from The Seahorse and The Hummingbird, Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games and Ada Press. Listen for how to win the whole pile.

• The Fantasy Flight Games golden age retrospective continues with a look at Tannhäuser, an ambitious, glossy FFG rework of an existing alternate-universe squad skirmish game that went for it all. It won us over, at least.

Track of the Week (23:29)
An irresistible internally rhymed hip hop vocal sample leads us from 1997’s “Dirt” by Death in Vegas back to Hip Hop First Lady Roxanne Shanté in her late-career attempt to declare war with every female rapper.

Don’t forget to listen for contest clues in both Games of the Week and Track of the Week in this episode.

This episode is dedicated to the plucky neighborhoods of Minneapolis, out there in the freezing cold and getting blackbagged, maced, shot, harassed, and defamed for their troubles.

Also want to shout out Minnesota native and wargame YouTuber Zilla Blitz, and current Minneapolis resident Liz Davidson of Beyond Solitaire. On successive days, they posted short videos on their channels about what’s happening to the place they love. I was heartened to see it and it encouraged me to start off this way.

Games of the Week

Ninja Borg TTRPG (3:38)
We’re talking to Walton Wood and Rugose Kohn about a bunch of riffs that they processed into an all-you-can-kill buffet called Ninja Borg, a polished book full of freewheeling violence that lets you act out your own hysterical remix of the ridiculous ninja B-movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Fantasy Flight Games’ Golden Age (33:46)
A special guest enriches my retrospective of Fantasy Flight Games that took over our house in the 2010s. Board game reviewer Matt Thrower about what that prodigious era of board game design looked like from his table. I’ll share an excerpt from that talk.

Track of the Week (48:04)
“We’re Gonna Get Ya,” by The Sonarphonics off The Bass That Ate Miami compilation. This entertaining cut is the first I’ve found in which a Miami bass crew (playfully) dared to call out New York at the peak of its grandeur. Then a selection from a NY Golden Era supergroup who, unlike their peers, went out of their way to show Miami and its souped-up electro beats some love.

May I send you a cocktail book full of bad ideas and a charming frog sticker? Here’s how.

Use the code BREAKUP to get 50% off anything on the Quirk Events calendar, including the Indie Boardgame Showcase that’s touring Beantown, Chicago, D.C., New York, Denver, and Philly in ‘26.

Games of the Week (3:40)
• Launching my first probe in SETI was like seeing my soul break the gravitic well of holiday depression. Find out what happened on my first solo play. I also include tips for learning any heavy game on your own when you feel like a piece of shit all November and December.

• The Fantasy Flight Games golden age retrospective continues with a look back at Arkham Horror 2nd Edition. This was the second game we ever bought from the catalog. It summoned a bunch of drunks.

Track of the Week (22:07)
Highlighting selections from The Herbaliser’s FabricLive.26 set at the legendary club of the same name. We’re zeroing in on a three-song blend that I listen to every night.

May I send you a cocktail book full of bad ideas and a charming frog? Here’s how.

Use the code BREAKUP to get 50% off anything on the Quirk Events calendar, including the Indie Boardgame Showcase that’s touring Beantown, Chicago, D.C., New York, Denver, and Philly in ‘26.

Want to demo your indie game design for attendees? You’ve got until Jan. 6 to apply.

Games of the Week (3:41)
• Ryuutama : Natural Fantasy Roleplay: An excerpt from my latest chat with Walt, who lightens the typical mood with a twee-in-the-best-way storytelling game about bards who get into charming entanglements while roaming the medieval Japanese countryside.

• A selection from my latest work with Dwelling a solo RPG for ghosts. We’re at the halfway point of the book, where the narrator descends to the basement of a haunted house for a full-on cocaine flashback. The recall is not euphoric.

• We’re finishing up with Space Hulk: Death Angel, a gripping and cinematic cooperative tactical game that kicked off a multi-year Fantasy Flight Games buying spree that, in retrospect, set the rhythm of our household’s Saturday nights for the next six years.

Track of the Week (23:26)
“Can I Get Open?” by Original Flavor. Follow along as I chase a sample back from this ’93 track and end up finding a well of solstice magic inside the many saxophones of jazz giant Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

May I send you a cocktail book full of bad ideas and a charming frog? Here’s how.