About Colin Merritt

Hey, I'm Colin Merritt. I teach seventh grade science at a public middle school in Richmond, Virginia, which means my whole job is figuring out whether an explanation actually lands or just sounds like it should. That habit doesn't stay at school. Every review here is at least a little bit me grading the thing itself: does it teach itself in a reasonable number of minutes, does it earn the time it asks for at setup and teardown, does it hold up at two players on a random Tuesday when that's all the table I've got. I finish everything before I rate it, game played to the actual end, book read cover to cover, no exceptions.

I've taught seventh grade science for a while now, which sounds like it has nothing to do with board games until you realize my whole workday is spent watching whether an explanation actually works or just sounds like it should on paper. I bring that same test to everything I review. Can I teach this to someone in under fifteen minutes? Does the setup and teardown time pay for itself in what you actually get to play? Does it hold up at two players, since most weeknights that's the whole table I've got, my spouse across from me and our kid usually asleep by the time we get a real game going. I got into the hobby the ordinary way, a friend teaching me Dominion on a weekend, and kept going from there into heavier stuff. I read constantly and without much of a plan, hard science fiction and classic dystopian short fiction sitting on the same nightstand as dense popular nonfiction about minds, algorithms, and why big institutional plans keep failing in the same predictable ways. Everything on this site got finished before it got a rating. No review copies, nothing sponsored, just what I actually own and actually played or read.