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Nonsense, She Wrote

dissecting stories - badly

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Family game night should always feature existential horror

Board GamesGame Reviews

Review: Arkham Horror the card game

written by M. J. Magee

When I wrote that I love the stories of particularly in-depth board games in my bio, I’m pretty sure people thought I was joking.

Those people need to play more games.

Board games are incredible. My fiancé and I can’t get enough of them. In a metaphoric sense, anyway. In both a fiscal and a physical flat-to-board-game ratio sense, it’s not at all true.

Board games have evolved past Monopoly and Fifty Other Versions of Monopoly Why Is There So Much Monopoly Why?.

Now you have games where you can play co-operatively as Tibetan monks, working together to save a village from evil spirits. You can play as the cast of Battlestar Galactica, trying to work out who’s a human and who’s a cyclon as disaster after disaster hits you in the face. You can change a campaign board game every time you play it, ripping up cards and slathering the board in stickers as your team of (highly attractive) medics and scientists struggle to slow down the colourful disease cubes ravaging the world.

Nowadays, board games are made to compete with movies and video games rather than bubonic plague, the only big time-killer when Snakes and Ladders became popular. They’re not about rolling dice. They’re about strategy and quick-thinking and – yes – story-telling.

Arkham Horror is proof of that.

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Review: Arkham Horror the card game was last modified: May 2nd, 2017 by M. J. Magee

Who writes this nonsense?

Who writes this nonsense?

It's me. Mell. I do. Hello.

I love stories. Books, films, comics, particularly indepth board games, inappropriate anecdotes overheard at the chemist - I love them all.
And I love writing stories.
Which isn't the same as being good at it.
But analysing what makes a story seems as good a way to learn as any.
Join me as I inexpertly insult famed and published authors, and work out how to write something that's not just nonsense.

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100-word story 1940s X-Men in Wales Absurdist funeral directors Animation Are readers actually going to care about this subplot with the main character's girlfriend's brother's best friend? Better than Agatha Christie Collectable card game Damn you plot bunnies damn you straight to hell Disney Disturbing unnecessary and vaguely incestuous romance Dogs who are also pirates Family game night should always feature existential horror Fantasy Flight Games Fiona Cummins Genre identity crisis Helen Callaghan Is Ransom an actual name? Jolly Rover Middle-age writers shouldn't try to guess what 'bae' means Murder-mystery Naming characters Not being good at similies is like... something else that's rubbish at things Pirates who are also dogs Pusillanimous mumbling Quickie Ransom Riggs Reader's Digest Recommended read Review Robbed! Ruth Ware See me after class Spoiler-free review Storylines gone wild That awkward moment when your friends think you're begging for an end to a tormentous relationship when you just want your spelling checked The Evil Voice Unreliable - except maybe not so unreliable - narrators Unreliable narrators Was-there-a-murder-is-the-mystery Writing You can play as characters other than Roland Banks but why would you? Young Adult

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