Review: Small World of Warcraft takes the tabletop strategy hit to Azeroth

Enlarge Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com. Since it was first published in 2009, the hyper-competitive family strategy game Small World has become a perennial tabletop favorite. Ironically, given its name, its success has caused its fantasy realm to grow over the…

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion makes the megahit more accessible

Enlarge / There’s still a lot of stuff in this box. (credit: Cephalofair Games) Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com. There’s a reason Gloomhaven (read our 2017 review) is so popular. There’s also a reason why half of my friends who own…

One hell of a send-off: Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 wraps a stylish board game series

Enlarge Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com. When Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was released in 2015, it was met with a rave reaction from players. A campaign-based take on the original Pandemic, it dropped fans into the familiar role of medics battling to eradicate deadly…

Stardew Valley: The Board Game—a loving production but a mixed review from Grandpa

Enlarge (credit: Charles Theel) Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com. Stardew Valley: The Board Game was a surprise February announcement. Somehow this colorful collaboration between Cole Medeiros and Stardew Valley‘s sole developer Eric Barone was kept hush-hush for two years. When it…

Aliens board game is another ho-hum dungeon crawler

Enlarge / Ripley defending Newt. Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com. Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps is a peculiar release. Aliens, James Cameron’s follow-up to the sci-fi classic Alien is frankly one of the best action films ever made, so…

It’s Ars Frontiers week—and we’ve got something happening every day

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) We made it! After announcing our inaugural conference and providing you with updates, we’re ready to get things started. We’ve been planning this event for months, and as some of your favorite Ars staffers start hopping on planes to meet up in Washington, DC, later in the week, we’ll be kicking things…

Just say no (to content): Nietzsche’s surprising “information diet”

Enlarge This is an excerpt from the new book In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, by Ars Technica’s Deputy Editor, Nate Anderson. The book “adapts Friedrich Nietzsche’s passionate quest for meaning into a world overwhelmed by ‘content.’ Written long before the advent of smartphones, Nietzsche’s…