Board game and book reviews plus personal notes from Colin Merritt, written after every game gets played to the end and every book gets finished cover to cover.https://colinmerritt.com/en-UShttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep/Blade Runner gets the atmosphere right, but Philip K. Dick's actual book is stranger, sadder, and a lot more interested in fake sheep than the movie ever was.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-windup-girl/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-windup-girl/A future run on calories instead of oil, and a Thailand that survived collapse better than the rest of the world, dense enough to lose readers who don't settle in for it.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/teaching-theo-to-lose-at-faraway/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/teaching-theo-to-lose-at-faraway/My seven-year-old wanted to play the backwards-scoring card game after watching me review it, and losing gracefully was never going to be part of the deal.Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/weapons-of-math-destruction/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/weapons-of-math-destruction/You don't need to be good at math to understand exactly how the math is being used against you, and that's the entire point of the book.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/the-reading-log-i-actually-keep/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/the-reading-log-i-actually-keep/Forty minutes before bed, no phone in the room, and a plain notebook that's more honest about my reading habits than any app ever managed to be.Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/terraforming-mars/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/terraforming-mars/The engine builds itself into something genuinely satisfying, but I've never once finished a game of this in under two and a half hours.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/fifteen-minutes-or-the-closet/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/fifteen-minutes-or-the-closet/I made the rule official this year and lost a couple of favorites to it immediately, which is exactly how I know it's the right rule.Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas/Ten pages long, and it's been sitting in the back of my head longer than novels ten times its size.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/my-wife-reads-the-table-better-than-i-do/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/my-wife-reads-the-table-better-than-i-do/I know the rules cold and still lose to her more often than not, and it took me a while to admit that's not a coincidence.Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/race-for-the-galaxy/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/race-for-the-galaxy/Your first two games will be chaos, the iconography alone will fight you, and then something clicks and you can't stop playing it.Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-social-conquest-of-earth/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-social-conquest-of-earth/E.O. Wilson spends half this book on ants and I found myself invested anyway, which tells you something about how well the man can write.Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/accidentally-teaching-seeing-like-a-state/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/accidentally-teaching-seeing-like-a-state/A tangent about a failed urban planning project turned into an actual lesson, and I'm still not sure if that was good teaching or just me being a nerd out loud.Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/seeing-like-a-state/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/seeing-like-a-state/A book about failed utopian city plans from decades ago that ended up explaining more about modern tech companies than half the books actually about tech companies.Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-giver/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-giver/A book aimed at kids that doesn't flinch from the actual horror of a world that traded pain away, and traded almost everything else away with it.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/lost-ruins-of-arnak/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/lost-ruins-of-arnak/Worker placement and deck building shouldn't fit together this cleanly, and yet the two-worker limit is exactly why it works.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/richmond-thunderstorm-season/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/richmond-thunderstorm-season/A power flicker mid-storm turned into an accidental board game marathon, and I've come around to thinking summer storms are the best thing about living here.Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/moon-colony-bloodbath/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/moon-colony-bloodbath/A small-box Donald X. Vaccarino card game about your colonists dying one by one, and somehow it's funnier every time it happens.Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/the-two-player-rule-that-runs-my-shelf/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/the-two-player-rule-that-runs-my-shelf/Most weeknights the table is exactly two people, so a game that only shines at four is a game I'll admire once a year and never actually play.Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/blood-rage/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/blood-rage/The drafting is the whole game and the drafting is also the thing I'd change first, which is a strange place to land on something I still enjoy this much.Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/faraway/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/faraway/You score your tableau backwards from how you built it, and that one twist is doing more work than a game this small has any right to pull off.Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/the-colleague-who-wanted-in/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/the-colleague-who-wanted-in/A history teacher down the hall kept asking about the minis on my desk, and turning that curiosity into an actual invite took longer than it should have.Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/mechs-vs-minions/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/mechs-vs-minions/Gorgeous components, a genuinely clever programming mechanic, and a difficulty curve that never really shows up to challenge you.Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/echopraxia/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/echopraxia/A sequel to Blindsight that trades some of the first book's momentum for even harder questions about whether free will is a story we tell ourselves.Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/grading-rulebooks-like-lab-reports/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/grading-rulebooks-like-lab-reports/Seventh grade science taught me to time explanations to the second, and now I can't read a rulebook without doing the same thing.Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/superintelligence/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/superintelligence/Nick Bostrom has genuinely important things to say about machine intelligence, and a real talent for making the reading of them feel like homework.Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/essays/i-was-wrong-about-dominion/https://colinmerritt.com/essays/i-was-wrong-about-dominion/First I loved it uncritically, then I dismissed it a little unfairly, and it took writing the actual review to land somewhere honest in the middle.Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-reality-dysfunction/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/the-reality-dysfunction/The first four hundred pages of this brick are a genuine slog, and then Peter F. Hamilton flips a switch and I couldn't put it down for a week.Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBooksColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/dominion/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/dominion/The game that invented the genre it's still being measured against, which is exactly why it's the one I reach for least.Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/lotr-fate-of-the-fellowship/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/lotr-fate-of-the-fellowship/Matt Leacock takes the Pandemic system to Middle-earth, and Sauron's influence spreading like an infection is a better fit than it has any right to be.Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritthttps://colinmerritt.com/reviews/scythe/https://colinmerritt.com/reviews/scythe/Every faction board works differently while somehow tracking the same underlying game, and that alone is worth the shelf space.Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesColin Merritt