Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🎲 We Rollin' On Twenties... Hey, everybody. Geekway Mini 2023 was this weekend, so here's a run-down of everything I played! Tiletum Super crunchy Euro point-salad game that blends dice drafting with contract fulfillment and a few other odds-and-ends (in the point-salad tradition). You're traveling around Europe in Ye Olde Times building and populating houses, working on Cathedrals, attending fairs, and trying to stay in the good graces of the Crown. I normally don't like point-salad games that much, but I enjoyed this one reasonably well, mostly because it didn't overstay its welcome. It had a lot  of bits and set up for a game that's ultimately not that complex, so I don't know how strongly I can recommend it. Northgard: Uncharted Lands 4x deck-builder with a Carcassonne -style tile-placement board setup. Viking clans are exploring the land, gathering food, lumber, and lore. Fight over land, construct buildings, recruit more armies, and close out territor

🚰 A Friend Who'll Tease Is Better... The Crime: Purity The Guilty Party: Jonathan Franzen Overview: Ostensibly a re-imagining of Great Expectations , Purity  tells the story of Purity "Pip" Tyler, only instead of actually telling that story it kind of wanders around that story for 700 overwrought pages. Why I Hate It... I don't know who the target audience for this one is, but it sure ain't me. There are so many levels on which this book just didn't work. Where to start. Let's start with character. Purity  doesn't have characters. It has named assemblages that were hastily constructed at the literary quirk factory. I never found myself sympathizing with them or caring about their journeys, and it's a good thing too, because so much of those journeys happens off-camera. With the exception of Andreas. We get to see all of his oddities up close and personal, that is until he is dismissed away as being mentally ill. The protagonist, Purity, goes from

👩 Flames on the side of my face... Welcome to 2023. For this year's blog series I'm going to be doing something a little different. For the last few years I've chronicled different things that I love: movies, albums, board games, video games. For this year, I'm going to be focused on things that I didn't love, but had a very visceral reaction to nonetheless. This year's blog series is devoted to my favorite hate-reads, hate-watches, maybe even a hate-listen or a hate-play or two. Regardless of form, these are bits of media that I consumed either anticipating that I would not like them or that I consumed expecting to like and then... doing the opposite of that. This is not as bleak as it sounds, I swear. I love bad things. I enjoy looking at something that I don't like that everyone else seems to and trying to figure out why I reacted differently. I enjoy looking at things that were universally panned to try to understand where they fell apart. I willingly e

⛏️ They came with fire, they came with axes... Deep Rock Galactic  is a co-op first person shooter in which a team of up to four dwarves go on mining missions in the procedurally generated caves of Hoxxes IV. Released in 2020 by Coffee Stain Publishing, it was the first game developed by Danish studio Ghost Ship Games and draws heavily from Minecraft  and Left 4 Dead . How I Remember It... For this final installment of Memory Leaks , I want to talk about a game that I loved so much I had to let it go. Honestly, I'm not going to talk about the game that much. It's new, it's fun, it's inexpensive, it's got a very wry sense of humor and some inventive biome design. If you like co-op FPSs with rogue-like sensibilities and lots of customizations and collectibles, you should definitely check it out. The learning curve is a teensy bit steep, so play it with friends who can show you the ropes. I have a bit of an addictive personality. I don't want to just enjoy somethin

💼 Oh, I'm Sorry, Did I Break Your Concentration? For a long time I thought I was a Quentin Tarantino fan. Sure, Reservoir Dogs  was a little rough, and Jackie Brown  was kinda boring, and then Kill Bill  was a bit bloated. But Pulp Fiction  was a masterpiece, and I maintained my fandom on the strength of that. It was one of the first films I bought when I switched from VHS to DVD. And that's not hyperbole. I literally bought a copy of this movie at the same time as I was buying my first DVD player. There's a poster from it up in my children's play room. We should probably take that down, honestly. Anyway, at some point I realized that I don't actually like Tarantino's films all that much. He has a particular affect to his storytelling that has grown tiresome. But I still feel a lot of affection for Pulp Fiction , and it had been a minute since I'd seen the now nearly thirty-year-old film, so I was curious how it held up. Was it still any good now that I am

💣 I Gotta Say That Mable... Super Bomberman  was the first title in the Bomberman  series released for the Super Nintendo. Published by Hudson in 1993, it continued the franchise's model of "maze + action" gameplay with upgraded graphics. You drop timed bombs that will explode in all (four) directions a set number of hexes and you use these to defeat enemies, clear paths, and collect power-ups to your character and/or your bombs. Hijinx ensue. How I Remember It... I don't remember how or when we acquired this game, but it definitely wasn't right after release. It was one of those franchises that I'd been vaguely aware of for most of my life (the first game was released in 1983) but had never been terribly drawn towards. And then we acquired it. And... It's kinda like a  Zelda  dungeon but with fewer puzzles and more explosives. I played it a ton  one summer between what would have to have been my junior and senior years of college and listening to Music