Board game and book reviews plus personal notes from Blake Ramsey, written after every game gets played out and every book gets finished, never before.https://blakesidequest.com/en-UShttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/snow-crash/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/snow-crash/A pizza delivery driver who moonlights as the greatest swordfighter alive, and somehow the linguistics-as-virus plot is the least ridiculous part of the book.Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/war-and-peace-and-war/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/war-and-peace-and-war/A biologist-turned-historian's grand theory of why empires rise and fall, genuinely fascinating and occasionally over its own skis.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/out-of-control/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/out-of-control/A journalist's sweeping tour through complex systems, hive minds, and neobiology, dated in its specifics but still right about the shape of the argument.Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/forbidden-stars/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/forbidden-stars/A genuinely clever order-based war game buried under a five-hour first play, the kind of thing you respect more than you actually get to the table.Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/arkham-horror-the-card-game/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/arkham-horror-the-card-game/The deckbuilding-as-campaign structure makes every weakness card and every dead investigator feel like it happened to a character, not a stat block.Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/blood-on-the-clocktower/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/blood-on-the-clocktower/The best social deduction game I've played by a wide margin, and also the one that asks the most out of whoever agrees to run it.Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/how-my-dads-chess-set-ended-up-on-my-shelf/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/how-my-dads-chess-set-ended-up-on-my-shelf/It's the one piece on the shelf that isn't there for a review, and it's the one I'd actually save first if something ever went wrong.Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/7-wonders/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/7-wonders/A booster draft with a civilization built onto it, fast enough that even the seven-player games I dreaded turned out fine.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/hyperion/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/hyperion/Seven pilgrims trade stories on the way to meet a monster that might grant a wish or a death, structured like the Canterbury Tales and hitting like a gut punch.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/this-war-of-mine/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/this-war-of-mine/A genuinely affecting solo experience marketed as a party for six, and the mismatch between those two things is most of what's wrong with it.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/why-i-read-the-last-page-first-sometimes/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/why-i-read-the-last-page-first-sometimes/It's not about spoiling the plot. It's about knowing what the author's actually building toward before I sit through three hundred pages of runway.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/ancillary-justice/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/ancillary-justice/A revenge plot told from the fragment of a warship's mind, and the gender-pronoun choice everyone argues about turns out to be the least interesting thing in it.Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/monsoon-season-always-wins/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/monsoon-season-always-wins/Every July the power goes out somewhere in Tucson mid-game, and every July I forget to plan around it until it's already happened again.Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/a-door-into-ocean/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/a-door-into-ocean/A pacifist, all-female water world under threat of conquest, written by an actual biologist, and the ecology is more convincing than the politics it's carrying.Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/phi/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/phi/A neuroscientist's attempt at a Hofstadter-style fable about consciousness, more interesting as an experiment in form than as an actual argument.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/vantage/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/vantage/An open-world co-op that mostly lives up to two years of hype, though I went in braced for disappointment after watching the pre-release discourse.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/the-spreadsheet-that-runs-my-shelf/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/the-spreadsheet-that-runs-my-shelf/Columns for player count, session length, and a pass/fail field I definitely stole from work. Priya calls it my other job.Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/children-of-time/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/children-of-time/The last humans in the universe find a planet seeded with an evolution experiment gone sideways, and somehow I end up rooting for the spiders.Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/root/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/root/Everybody at the table is playing a genuinely different game, which is the whole point and also exactly why the first session is rough.Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/cascadia/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/cascadia/A tile-laying puzzle that pulls off the rare trick of feeling relaxing and genuinely tense in the same sitting, once you stop treating it as a coloring book.Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/what-regression-testing-taught-me-about-replaying-old-games/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/what-regression-testing-taught-me-about-replaying-old-games/You don't retest a system because you think it broke. You retest it because you assume it works and you want proof, which is a completely different mindset than I used to bring to my own shelf.Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/harmonies/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/harmonies/Everyone is going to call this the Cascadia killer and it isn't quite that, it's its own puzzle, thinkier than it looks and more willing to punish a bad draft.Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/annihilation/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/annihilation/Four researchers enter a quarantined ecological zone that the previous eleven expeditions didn't survive intact, and the book's dry, clinical narrator turns out to be exactly the right choice.Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/i-was-wrong-about-solo-gaming/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/i-was-wrong-about-solo-gaming/I used to think playing a board game alone was a compromise, something you settled for. This War of Mine is the game that finally made me stop believing that.Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/unmatched-tales-to-amaze/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/unmatched-tales-to-amaze/A solid co-op reskin of a system built for head-to-head duels, and I never fully stopped missing the duels.Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/dont-trust-a-game-until-its-second-printing/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/dont-trust-a-game-until-its-second-printing/A game's first printing is a beta release wearing a retail box, and I've started treating it that way on purpose.Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/teaching-priya-root/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/teaching-priya-root/She picked the Vagabond because the little raccoon looked friendly. Two hours later the friendly raccoon had bankrupted both of the other factions I was also trying to explain.Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/the-coworker-who-wouldnt-let-arkham-horror-go/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/the-coworker-who-wouldnt-let-arkham-horror-go/Marcus asked me one question about the chaos bag over lunch and by the following Friday he'd bought a starter deck and a play mat.Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/essays/the-bug-report-i-never-filed/https://blakesidequest.com/essays/the-bug-report-i-never-filed/I found three actual contradictions in a rulebook last month and my first instinct, before I even noticed I was doing it, was to open a ticket.Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalBlake Ramseyhttps://blakesidequest.com/reviews/the-name-of-the-rose/https://blakesidequest.com/reviews/the-name-of-the-rose/A murder mystery in a medieval abbey that keeps interrupting itself with theology and heresy lectures, and somehow that's the part I ended up loving most.Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTBooksBlake Ramsey