In retrospect, pre-enshittification Google search was miraculously good. It's loss contributes greatly to the current feeling of online barrenness.

Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization reminded me of playing Monopoly as a child: www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

I mean... Why else would we have all these dice?

Dungeness & Dragons

Sometimes you learn about an upcoming game and your initial reaction is total astonishment that no-one has thought of this concept before gamefound.com/en/projects/...

Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia was interesting because the reasoning behind it's title became readily apparent during play: You're not changing the dystopia, you're just making it run smoother. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

Do you have an example of a boardgame that feels like it explores ideas and concepts through mechanics, visuals and other thematic experience in a significant and meaningful way? I mean, as in beyond the norm. I felt Spirit Island and Ark Nova do this, of the games I've played recently.

Death comes to one of the great monsters of our age.

In the boardgame version of Red Rising, helium tokens come in a cool contained the shape of a wolf's head. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

Can confirm, La Belle Epoque is a wonderful film!

Ticket acquired - see you at the Nordic Larp conference in Gothenburg!

Ticket sale for Knutpunk 2026 just opened, already got mine: knutpunkt.se

Got to play Shelob in Shelob's Lair today in War of the Ring: The Card Game: www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

Palestinian larp needs our help. During the last 15 years, a vibrant larp culture has grown in Palestine, together with the Palestinian larp organization Bait Byout. Israeli repression affects all areas of Palestinian larp, including larp. Donate if you can birthoflarp.wordpress.com/support-larp...

So, today I'm announcing a new book project... and doing a call for papers: crpgbook.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/t... It's an anthology of video game history outside the usual US perspective - an accessible & exciting panorama of different realities - and I'll pay 300 USD per article. Please share :)

Really proud of this profile Samantha Riedel wrote of me in THEM. We talked about BLACK FLAME, DC comics firing me, Palestine, and real-life community as it relates to the internet. www.them.us/story/gretch...

Loved the arch vampire melodrama of the 2000 anime film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust precisely because it's so different in style from any of my Vampire: The Masquerade work. It's fun to see cathedrals, immortal romance and high tragedy every once in a while.

Saw that the Swedish actor Björn Andrésen has died. There's a documentary about his life called The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. It's pretty painful to watch because of the intense sadness of a life mangled by having the desires of others projected onto it too early, too young, too forcefully.

I wrote about how "Grokipedia" is a new front on the war against reality itself. It's an attempt by the oligarchic class to seize the means of knowledge production itself and create a weaponized unreality. www.thedissident.news/grokipedia-a...

Today I played in a game that's been running for 19 years now, and for me the challenge is how to keep coming up with new angles for your character so it's interesting. I empathize with comics writers who have to figure out fresh takes about Spider-Man or Batman.

Call for papers: Mapping the Borders of Larp Research -The Academic seminar of the Nordic Larp Research Network.

I was reading @senetmagazine.bsky.social issue 20 and the Less is More article about Oink Games graphic design is a thing of beauty. I've worked on a couple of magazines in my previous career in journalism and I got to say that this... This was spectacular.

My friends have spent the last fifteen years praising Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game and now I finally played it too. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

Viticulture is a very successful pastiche of an eurogame, making me with I was having my 5th glass of wine on a tasting tour that started at 10 AM. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

A report from our little hobby group.

I was really into noise music in my twenties and Merzbow was one of my musical heroes. He's coming to Helsinki in January, pretty excited to see him live after all these years! www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR_8...

This is one of those articles which contextualizes random terms you might have seen online into a coherent cultural system. I found the quasi-religious quest for an enlightened state of gooning to be particularly interesting. harpers.org/archive/2025...

Now it is official! The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games is now, like, actually, surely, coming out! (This has been in the pipeline since 2018.) I have a piece here on this brand new thing called 'magic circle'. Everyone will be talking about it.

And we're funded! In Designers & Dragons: Origins @shannonappelcline.bsky.social makes an epic march through the early TSR catalog. Learn the lore (and bumps) behind some of the most iconic products and adventures of our hobby's founding days. Find out more here: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/e...

Was impressed by the historical viking boardgame Hnefatafl, an asymmetrical chess-like game in which a king tries to escape a siege. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

Bring back the classics! I played The Royal Game of Ur, a surprisingly sleek and functional racing game. Proof that classic game design can survive 4500 years of play. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

The conservationist zoo game Ark Nova had a very diligent approach to its theme but I understood some of the mechanics, particularly around winning, only at the end of my first game. I'll need to play it again to play with a clear idea of what I'm doing. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

"Vampire fiction is for tops and werewolf fiction is for bottoms" -me just now in an interview with a major magazine

I was really struck by the anticolonial ethos in Spirit Island. It felt unusual and unapologetic, and definitely welcome! One of the most intellectually interesting boardgames I've played. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

Saw the Worldglimpsing exhibit at ArkDes in Stockholm today. It is about experimental works that somehow feature role-playing speculative worlds. Of course, I had to see it as this is basically code for larp.

Sex scenes are almost never "gratuitous" or "unnecessary." You learn things about characters and relationships during sex that you can't really learn any other way, such as whether they're into fisting.

Welcome to follow Ellarion Tales, the new home of Odysseus and beyond! Odysseus is returning as a recurring event with an upgraded permanent spaceship through crowdfunding. Read our full blog post: ellariontales.com/blog/blog1-b... Join our mailing list at ellariontales.com/newsletter

Alien: Fate of the Nostromo was an elegantly designed game which delivered on the core Alien narrative experience. It was sleek enough that we managed three playthroughs in a single evening. www.juhanapettersson.com/100-boardgam...

Soooo... I wrote on dis. And had an amazing set of developers behind me, including @juhanaonparas.bsky.social Hope you all can take a closer look at this very intense adventure about loss, fire and insane amounts of emotional processing.

Heeeey I worked on this, a wonderfully atmospheric Werewolf story from @kungfufenris.bsky.social !

The West is going to suffer terrible consequences from Israel's genocide. New column 👇 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The recently released doc The Grim & the Dark is about grimdark aesthetics in games and art, framed as a journey that eventually culminates in a prophetic appearance by the veteran artist John Blanche. It's pretty good, and who knew that the first stop on the grimdark trip is Helsinki, Finland!

Holy shit someone uploaded the entire stage play adaptation of the Yakuza videogame series with English subtitles and it’s glorious and 500x better than the Amazon show youtu.be/Z2Msr4si6dU?...

Towards the end of the dream, the puppy girls were going to mutiny because they thought it was sexist that they were being forced into being puppy girls. And I was like, your arguments are sound but I really wish you wouldn't ruin this for me.

Marina Abramovic's immersive show Balkan Erotic Epic was quite the magnificent spectacle, showcasing various Balkan folk traditions at the confluence of sex and death.

I visited an excellent game store called FanBoy3 in Manchester and they had a display for Boardgamegeek top 10 games. But... Because many games on that top 10 are not available anymore, they only had Ark Nova and a few others. I bought the last Star Wars: Rebellion.

A TTRPG specialty bookstore "CCFOLIA BOOKS" opened in Tokyo. You can find many kinds of Japanese TTRPGs there. You should go there when you come to Japan. books.ccfolia.com

I used to work as a freelance journalist and sometimes the newspaper assignments were like: "Go interview this person and write it up, you got two hours." It was a great school for learning to work fast.